


make your peace with letting go

by notorious



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: F/F, I'm so sorry, ch2 not based on song bc this was supposed to be a one shot, i didn't mean to do any of this, nicole is not very nice, uMMMmm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 08:27:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20061001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notorious/pseuds/notorious
Summary: a lil messy trip through a lil bit of high school.ora stupid au based on stacy by quinn xcii.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> sorry in advance. don't come for me. mostly unedited bc i'm a lazy piece of shit so all mistakes are my own. side note before u get confused about the timeline it starts in september, jumps back to june, and then runs thru to february. get lit kids.
> 
> also if anybody cares an update to the juvie au is coming i promise i'm just very stupid and very slow.

** _SEPTEMBER._ **

Waverly Earp sprawls out on the fifty yard line to stretch after a doubly long cheer practice. It’s homecoming season and the only propositions she’s had were from that asshole Champ Hardy and the ghoulish Gardner kid.

Champ’s asked her to the dance three times now, actually, because one no wasn’t enough for him. Apparently. And if that’s not enough she’s had Chrissy and Steph on her case about why won’t she give him a chance? If they think he’s such hot shit, she’d asked them, then why don’t one of them take the poor kid for a ride? They’ve been kind enough to reduce their insistence since then to nudges and god-awfully irritating looks whenever Champ comes around.

If only they knew.

If only Waverly could spill about what’s nearly four months in the making but somehow still nothing yet at all. They’d understand if they knew. Well. Only as much as Waverly understands herself, which is not entirely all that much. All she knows is she feeds on it, it fuels her, and that’s enough for now.

As Waverly arcs her torso over a knee and grasps a foot with both hands and tugs to make the stretch burn she spots a pair of boots planted in the dirt underneath the visitors’ bleachers. Even from her station at the center of the fifty yard line she knows good and well the nine-eyed boots are fashioned from Italian leather and that they’re _custom _and oh so _kick-ass _because she’s listened to their owner brag about them time and again and again. They were the only sixteenth birthday present the girl got after hounding her parents for the better part of a year, Waverly knows.

The girl waiting for Waverly under the bleachers, waiting for the rest of the cheer squad to fuck off home so they can make this field their own. It’s what they do.

It’s another ten minutes before the lot is finally vacant and the sun is starting to sink toward the horizon. Waverly stretches her arms once more behind her back before scrambling to her feet and jogging to the bleachers.

Beneath them, bathing in the familiar slated mix of sun and shade, she finds exactly what she wants to see at the end of every long day:

The girl who manages to make cargo pants look good (okay, they _are _snug as skinnies) with that stupid too-big blue waffle henley she swiped from her father’s closet (typical) and two French braids slithering over her skull as slinky as serpents.

The girl in the custom boots.

The only senior girl with tattoos.

The absolute vision that is Nicole Haught. 

“What took you so long?” Nicole asks around a mouthful of smoke. “Was getting lonely under here.”

“Sorry,” Waverly says, crinkles her nose, closes in on Nicole where she’s perched on an old chemistry lab stool. “Homecoming season means longer practices. Didn’t I tell you?”

It’s early September, they’ve been back at school all of a week now, and the weather is still kind enough to keep the parkas and scarves at the back of the closet. For the Blue Devils’ cheerleading squad that means full uniform practices down to the blue and white bows tied around their high ponies.

Waverly likes to think it’s not the only reason Nicole’s started waiting around for her after practice, knows logically that it _probably _is not, but there’s always something eating at her brain when it comes to Nicole. She likes to think _that’s _just butterflies.

“Probably,” Nicole admits. She traps the blunt she’s been smoking on between her lips so her hands can slide around Waverly’s middle, palms flush against the sliver of skin between uniform skirt and top. “You look good, kid.”

There’s no way that line isn’t met with a colossal roll of the eyes, because, “You say that every time.”

A hand drops down to paw at Waverly’s rear and tug her hips in-between Nicole’s knees. The senior releases a stream of smoke from the corner of her lips, mumbles, “You got me there. Smoke with me?”

However many times they’ve done this particular dance is lost on Waverly. It’s always the same, never wavers, and it’s starting to feel like coming home at the end of the world’s longest day.

“I never get high,” Waverly mutters, tugging gently, lovingly, at one of Nicole’s braids.

It’s Nicole’s turn to bounce back with, “You say that every time.” But they both say a lot of things every time, just something they do.

Waverly hums her acknowledgment and watches transfixed as Nicole’s cheeks hollow around her blunt.

Some long moments later their lips meet and Nicole’s filling her mouth with smoke and Waverly’s falling further into her solid frame and that’s the moment for where the hundredth time these two become one.

There’s another dance they do, a push and pull, if you will.

Waverly, ever eager and excited, plays the explorer. Curious hands drift from shoulders to cheeks, fingertips catching on the sculpted slope that is Nicole’s jaw. They skirt down the outer planes of the redhead’s throat, gracing against tendons pulling taut when Nicole lifts her chin to push hard against Waverly’s mouth. Under the bleachers, Nicole on a stool, is the only time Waverly claims the height advantage. And still just barely.

Nicole, headstrong and hungry, plays the hunter. Lying silently in wait for her prey to fall into her lap. And fall the cheerleader does, every time.

Her hands don’t move like Waverly’s do; they’re steady, heavy, slow, territorial, and where they’d first staked claim on the brunette’s waist they’ve both slid home to lay on Waverly’s ass (where Nicole likes them best) in a touch that is at once both loving and greedy.

_“Nicky,” _Waverly whines against the senior’s mouth, pawing at her chest before planting firm and giving a little push. “Pause. Pause — okay? Come lay in the field with me. We can watch the stars come out.”

On the horizon, painted in orange sherbet and candied pink, laced with strokes of pales yellow, is a sunset fit for a queen. A blanket of warm color over a cold town with a name to fit: Purgatory.

Tucked away beneath a set of bleachers made to sit outsiders is one of the few places Waverly and Nicole can be Waverly and Nicole, together. 

Cordial nods are the extent of public interaction.

Nobody can know, that’s what Nicole told her.

It started under the stars, ended up under wraps, and stayed like that. And Waverly doesn’t know if it’s because she’s a girl, because she’s a sophomore and Nicole’s a senior, or what? She doesn’t think Nicole’s ashamed of her, no, not with the praise she dishes out, but maybe. Maybe it’s Nicole who’s ashamed of herself, but Waverly’s going to go ahead and take that thought with a grain of salt. Nicole Haught is nothing if not proud of who she is.

And she’s been giving this sophomore love since this past — 

** _JUNE._ **

It’s that time of year when school’s wrapped for the season and graduation is a short four days away and all that’s left for the teens of Purgatory to do is get dumpster-fire drunk at a rotating list of varsity hockey players’ homes that are all conveniently parentally unsupervised on any given night.

And that’s exactly what Waverly Earp is on her way to do for the very first time in her high school career.

This was Chrissy and Steph’s doing. While they refused to close out their freshman year without a bash there was a pizza and Wynonna back at the homestead where Waverly would absolutely rather be.

“Are you sure we’re allowed to just. . . show up to this thing?” Waverly pops her head in-between the two front seats and swings a look at each of her friends.

“Pretty sure asking permission to crash a party defeats the whole purpose,” Steph tells her from the driver’s seat. Only perk to getting held back twice is being the only freshman with a car.

Waverly worries her bottom lip between her teeth, weighing her options.

She could beg Steph to turn the car around and take her back home to her sister, but she’d never hear the end of that. She could fake excitement about the excursion in hopes it would turn genuine. Or she could go on and suck it up and make the best of it because there’s a teeny tiny part of her that wants to know if high school parties in actuality are anything like the movies.

“. . . Okay,” Waverly concedes. “Okay. We’re doin’ this.”

And it’s not so bad.

It’s loud, naturally, and the music is harsh and riddled with guitar twangs and the bass booms a wiggle into the floorboards every now and then and to Waverly it seems like everyone who’s anyone has turned up to this shindig.

Except Wynonna, she reminds herself, because while Wynonna Earp is a household name in Purgatory most folks aren’t too sweet on her. It’s a shame, Waverly thinks, because her sister is the best person she’s ever known. Their loss. 

Meanwhile, elsewhere.

Nicole Haught doesn’t hate parties, that’s not it, but she does hate half the kids who turn up to them. Which begs the question why she ever bothers to make an appearance. For the hell of it, she supposes. For the free booze, the excuse to get out of the house, for the feeling that she’s not alone in this godforsaken town.

And yeah, okay, for the other half of these kids. The ones she doesn’t actively despise because some of them are more than decent and actually want to kick it with her. So for the good ones.

Nicole spends the first half hour ducking behind doors and downing shitty beer from red Solo cups and doing her damn best to avoid the sharp-edged glares from her ex. Shae was the one who broke up with _her _if memory serves her right, so whatever that’s about Nicole isn’t sure she’d like to know.

An hour later she finds Mercedes Gardner smoking on the back porch and nursing a handle of Tennessee Honey on her lonesome. Nicole drops down beside her and snags the cigarette from her hand to trap it between her own two lips. She gets a smack to the leg for that one.

“Didn’t your mother ever teach you any manners? You’re supposed to ask before you take things,” Mercedes teases with a nudge.

“You would’ve said no,” Nicole counters around a mouthful of smoke, grinning like the tipsy idiot Mercedes has come to know and love.

They aren’t friends, per se, but they’re friendly. Shared classes, overlap of social circles, and general lack of shitty-ness keeps them on good terms. But everyone’s closer when they drink.

“Fair point.”

Somewhere else, concurrently, Waverly Earp has been ditched.

Chrissy and Steph are nowhere to be found and there are so damn many people at this thing she isn’t sure where she’d even start to look for them.

Champ won’t stop hounding her, the idiot. He’s cute, sure, and that’s probably mostly the booze talking, but he’s far from worth it. She’d let him bring her a first drink only because she didn’t want to be rude, and now he’s ready to declare himself a barnacle on the bow of her ship. And because she’s never had a drink in her life before tonight, because the first drink hit her like a freight train, she lets him bring her a second.

Then a third.

And now a fourth.

Then he asks her to dance, and with the heat in her veins and the pulsing drive of liquor in her system it’s too easy to say yes. She doesn’t know the song that’s pouring from the speakers, doesn’t know half of the people who are packed in around her, but she knows this isn’t half as bad as she’d been dreading.

Forget the fact that her two best friends managed to disappear on her within twenty minutes of showing up; Waverly Earp is enjoying herself. Until Champ’s hands start wandering, groping, unsolicited, and suddenly she feels like a caged animal desperate to wander.

“Champ,” she sounds out around a hiccup, planting her hands on his chest to put some distance between them. “I gotta — I need to get some air, okay? I’ll be right back.”

She doesn’t wait for his response, just turns and goes, making for the back door through the kitchen and pressing on until the dry heat of June swallows her whole and she’s standing in the middle of the backyard with her eyes on the night sky and her hands combing through her loose waves to pull them out of her face.

Deep breaths.

She doesn’t even know whose house this is, whose booze she’s been drinking, but the thoughts fade with each second she spends admiring the sky. Her face feels warmer than usual, cheeks especially, and there’s something slow about the way she moves now that’s a brand new sensation and Waverly might kind of like it. Maybe this warm fuzzy feeling is why Wynonna loves her whiskey like she does.

Waverly rubs her cheeks, mutters, “Oh yes — indeedy-do, I am _drunk,” _giggles, and nearly flies out of her shoes when a stranger’s voice barges into her thoughts.

“You all good over there?”

“Jesus,” Waverly hisses, laying a hand over her heart while rounding on the voice. “Don’t _do _that!”

There’s a girl sitting in the grass, back against a tree, with her legs kicked out in front of her, flask in hand. A girl in black jeans and a pink and green striped rugby shirt that is _entirely _too big for her with the sleeves pushed up over her elbows and none of the buttons done up. And she’s grinning, a big dopey one, and it might be the dark, or the liquor clouding her mind, but Waverly’s almost certain this girl has only one single dimple. And is downright adorable.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” the girl offers through her smirk. “You good?”

With no invitation, no offer, no welcome, Waverly sinks to the ground beside the girl and slumps against the tree with a huff.

Technically, yes, she’s good. And yet.

“How lame would it make me if I told you this is my first party?” It’s a hesitant question, one posed with wide eyes, a bashful smile, a beautiful shade of pink painting Waverly’s cheeks as she swings a look at her new companion. The girl with fiery red hair and eyes you could swim in if you dared and a tattoo of what Waverly thinks are chain links and vines twisting up and around her forearm and disappearing beneath her shirt sleeve but it’s dark and she’s drunk so she can’t be sure. Without waiting for an answer she presses on: “And I met a boy inside. Well — no, I already knew him, you know? But he got _really _handsy _really _fast and I’m — ” Waverly just shakes her head. There’s a lot she could say about Champ but she isn’t sure she has the right words or the effort or wants to talk about him at all. And she’d rather not think about him and his sweaty wandering hands any longer.

“Sounds charming,” the girl deadpans. She uncaps her flask and takes it to her lips.

“I think he just wanted to. . . bump nasties?” Waverly realizes aloud, and the girl chokes.

“Wow,” she says, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m gonna need you to never say that again. Drink,” she finishes, pushing the flask into Waverly’s hands. 

And Waverly does because the thing smells like what Wynonna pours for herself at home but it burns like a mother-trucker going down and she coughs like an amateur. It’s not cute. The second swallow goes down easier, smoother. When a third sip makes her hiccup she hands the thing back.

“God, what a total idiot you must think I am. Here I am — ” hiccup “ — drinking your booze, whining about a boy, and I haven’t even introduced myself. I’m — ” yup, hiccup.

“Waverly Earp,” the girl finishes for her.

Waverly looks at her in surprise. She knows she’s seen this girl in passing, maybe in the cafeteria, around the halls, maybe, doesn’t know her name though, but knows she sticks to upperclassmen’s corridors. So she’s older.

“You know who I am?”

“You’re pretty hard to miss.”

“I didn’t think anyone noticed me,” Waverly admits softly, eyes downcast. Anyone besides Wynonna, that is.

“Think again.”

Waverly watches in silence while the girl fishes a cigarette from a pocket and sparks it with a zippo. Her features are soft, but she wears them hard. A face full of elegant slopes and smooth planes of fair skin and a pair of lips Waverly thinks could sweet talk a sugar cube (excuse me?) and the girl still manages to look like she could put you six feet under without breaking a sweat. She drinks from her flask once more before passing it off to Waverly.

“I’m Nicole,” she offers after a moment.

“Hi, Nicole.” Waverly flashes a crooked grin and tips her head back to drink. Somehow the burn in her throat is brand new again. While her mind starts to muddle and her limbs flood with ooey-gooey fluidity her had falls back against the tree trunk and her eyes return to the stars. 

“Hi,” Nicole echoes.

Over their heads Waverly swears the stars have started to move. Not like the infinite beams of hyperspace travel, no, more like they’re all taking little jaunts to visit their friends on the other side of the sky.

“Aurora borealis. . .” Waverly mumbles at the sky, familiarizing herself with another swallow of Nicole’s whiskey.

“What was that?”

“Constellation,” Waverly tells her, tracing her finger along the semi-circle of stars. “Borealis. Aurora.”

No.

That’s not right.

Nicole laughs and the sweet sound makes something in Waverly’s belly turn a somersault.

“That’s not even a constellation.”

“I think I know my stars,” Waverly clips back.

“And I think you’re drunk.”

Waverly swings a look at her, cheeky and challenging all at once. “And what about it?”

The look holds up maybe two seconds before she has to bite back a blush because Nicole’s eyeing her like she’s a puppy that just ran headfirst into a mirror.

“It’s cute,” Nicole says.

There are few people in this world Waverly cares to take that compliment from, and Nicole may have just made herself one of them. Maybe it’s the way she’s looking at her like she only wants to see the stars through Waverly’s eyes, or the simple truthful tone in which she speaks. Fuck if Waverly knows.

Or maybe it’s because she’s drunk and she _really _likes the other way Nicole looks at her, like she wants to see more than what’s on the surface. Maybe Nicole doesn’t always look so hard, maybe you just have to be Waverly Earp to see the soft.

It scares her a little bit — she’s never cared about female attention before, but she’s living for Nicole’s attention. It’s new and it’s noteworthy and the fact alone that Nicole didn’t resist her unsolicited company — the fact that Nicole _noticed _her — is enough to put Waverly at ease. And hell if she wouldn’t call Nicole cute right back.

“Corona,” Nicole clarifies. “Corona borealis. That’s what you were lookin’ for.” 

Waverly gives a happy little shrug like sure, yeah, that’s what she was looking for. 

“Now if you truly know your stars, prove it.”

And Waverly Earp is never one to back down from a challenge.

So.

She forces her gaze away from Nicole and fixes on the sky, screws one of her eyes shut when the first attempt gets too wobbly, and picks a starting point.

“There,” she mutters, slowly tracing over a pointed arc and down from the inside of its center. “Aquila. Like _‘and the Bee,’ _but spelled like the Romans do. Big ol’ arrow.”

** _JULY._ **

“Your sister would have me tarred and feathered for this,” Nicole mumbles around a grunt as she tugs Waverly’s jeans free of her legs.

They’re on a blanket in the bed of Nicole’s pickup under the stars behind the old abandoned bread factory at the edge of town. Super romantic.

_Let’s keep this a secret, _that’s what Nicole told her the first time they got their limbs all tangled and fogged up the windows in the cab of the truck.

_It’ll keep it special._

And Waverly, young and eager and so infatuated, agreed. 

And it’s hard for her not to fall for Nicole — hell, she was falling even before she left that party last month — and even harder for her to pretend her heart doesn’t flutter and her stomach doesn’t do backflips every time Nicole so much as looks at her. And that damn one-dimpled grin, now that thing drives her absolutely _mad._

“No more Wynonna talk,” Waverly insists with a whine, shedding her top in favor of baring her chest to the sticky July air.

Any qualms about being stripped naked in the bed of a pickup truck she once held have been quelled by many a night like this one. The open air is like a familiar blanket now.

Which makes Nicole what?

The grace that is sleep, maybe. Or just grace in all its glory.

Nicole lays over Waverly and kisses her, hard. It’s hot and wet and enough to send a shiver down her spine in eighty-seven degree weather.

There’s something blissfully humiliating about being in absolutely no state of dress while Nicole hovers over her in a sports bra and those douchey Adidas track pants that make her look like she just strolled out of a locker room. It’s a good look.

Everything looks good on Nicole.

And Waverly looks best beneath Nicole.

Skin slick with sweat, heart ready to beat out of her chest, mind ready to pledge itself to all that is Nicole Haught. That’s the trouble with their encounters: they all serve to remind Waverly how ready and willing she is to sign herself over to whatever the hell Nicole has in store for her. She’d sign in blood, she knows, she’d commit to that, and she’d be okay with it.

Anything for Nicole, she’s starting to realize, she’d do.

There aren’t any red flags, no, not yet, nor has Waverly recognized the danger in what she’s prepared to do. What she’s done so many times already.

What is it they say about ignorance being bliss?

Waverly thinks she finally understands that. Understands that letting certain things slide preserves the state of her mental wellbeing, so here they are. In the bed of Nicole’s pickup, Waverly naked, Nicole half-bared, both of them eager to dig into one another. That’s how it goes.

Nicole’s hands shift from Waverly’s sides to low on her hips, lower on her legs, up the insides of her knees, pushing her thighs open. It’s heaven and it’s hell wrapped up tight in a single parcel; there is sweet delight and there is honeyed detriment all at once as Waverly gives herself to Nicole for the umpteenth time.

“Hands,” Nicole mutters, a familiar command, one Waverly’s good and acquainted with by now.

She complies, she always does. Waverly lifts her hands and tucks them up under her head, fingers laced together, prepared to hold their place. That’s where they’ll stay.

Waverly finds the stars, lets her eyes ghost over them, tries faintly to commit them to memory while Nicole’s mouth travels the distance from her collarbones to her hips. It’s easy to get distracted, Waverly knows, and she does it well. Her hands tense beneath her head when Nicole finds a hipbone with her teeth, tugging at taut skin just to tease, and what she wouldn’t give to thread her fingers through Nicole’s hair as she descends on her.

** _AUGUST._ **

It isn’t until the day Nicole says flat out “nobody can find out things that we do” that Waverly starts to wonder if there isn’t something terribly unhealthy with the way the two of them are progressing, if there isn’t something wrong with the secrecy and the no-labels and the hands-off rule when Nicole goes down on her.

At first she’d only thought Nicole had an aversion to being touched, but she knows that’s not true. Not if her wandering hands when they kiss are anything to go by. So now she doesn’t know. Doesn’t know if there’s something wrong with _her _or _Nicole _or _them. _She’s been second guessing the whole thing (and praying not to, and pretending she doesn’t) about as long as it’s been going on, but she’s never thought of their relationship as being unsound. Unfair, maybe, because Waverly would kill to go public, would kill to call Nicole hers, but never unhealthy. The thought makes her stomach churn.

If Wynonna has taught her anything it’s to be unapologetic in who you are. There is no shame in being an _us _with Nicole, no shame in pursuing something that makes you feel alive, but maybe Nicole doesn’t see it that way, or doesn’t want to. Waverly always jumps back to the fact that she’ll be a sophomore in the fall and Nicole a senior. But she’ll be sixteen in less than a month and next to Nicole’s seventeen years on earth that’s nothing.

Waverly’s going to fry every last one of her brain cells trying to work this out, she swears. The logical solution is to _ask _Nicole why she doesn’t want her telling anyone about them, why they can’t be an _us _for the world to see. But she’s scared. Scared that opening that can of worms will only make Nicole push her away and Waverly wants to get _closer._

So she goes to Wynonna. With minimal detail, of course.

“If I tell you something super secret will you promise not to freak out and-or ask who I’m talking about?”

Wynonna looks up from her Game Boy and the descending trill of Snake’s game over music warbles softly. She narrows her eyes at her little sister, lifts her chin, and, “Absolutely not,” she says.

“Great.” Waverly drops down opposite Wynonna at the kitchen table and leans over its edge, thumbs twiddling beneath the surface. She hesitates here because Nicole would go absolutely batshit if she knew what Waverly was about to divulge and even the idea of her — girlfriend? no, definitely not; friend who she’s made a habit of sleeping with? sure, why not — upset with her is enough to turn her stomach. She looks at Wynonna, looks down at her hands, sighs, shakes her head. Maybe she shouldn’t.

Wynonna knocks her foot under the table. “Well? Out with it, junior.”

Now or never.

Caution to the wind? You betcha.

“So. . . say there’s a person. Who I like. A lot, god, so much.” And that’s the first time she’s admitted that out loud and hell if it doesn’t feel good. But also kind of bites because: “. . and I think they like me too, ‘cause we hold hands and stuff, you know?” — (“Gross.”) — “But I’m not allowed to tell anyone about us.”

That’s when Wynonna does the first thing Waverly asked her to promise not to.

“Allowed? _Allowed?! _What are you, shtupping your teacher?”

“God, Wynonna, no. I — ”

“What kind of horse shit is that? ‘Not allowed to,’ oh, kiss my ass. Who is this asshole? I’ve got two fists that’ll teach ‘em to make my baby sister hide in the shadows. Gimme a name.” And there’s the second.

Waverly deflates, defeated, and drops her head into her hands, says nothing. She’s thinking. Or trying to. She thought telling Wynonna would make her feel better, not so alone in this whole thing, but all she finds is shame. For the state of the relationship itself and now for opening her mouth when it’s the last thing Nicole wanted her to do. And, okay, maybe she shouldn’t care so much about what Nicole wants, should maybe put her own feelings first, but she cares about Nicole. More than anyone but Wynonna. Which suddenly feels like a most dangerous sentiment.

“Waverly,” Wynonna urges. “I want a name.”

“I can’t,” Waverly croaks. Her head lifts slowly, like it’s painful for more than just her heart, and catching her sister’s eyes full of anger only makes it worse. Then, so quietly she barely hears herself, “. . . I don’t want to lose her.”

To her credit Wynonna doesn’t look _too _surprised at the admission. Her love for Waverly tends to trump all.

“Her?” Wynonna asks delicately, forcing softness into her eyes where before there had only been rage in hopes of making this easier for her sister. In hopes of soothing a type of pain Wynonna cannot even begin to fathom.

While sexuality and secrecy have been known to run hand in hand, Waverly obviously doesn’t want them to.

“Yeah,” Waverly sighs out. “Her. I just want to know _why _but I’m afraid if I ask it’ll change everything. And I _like _everything how it is. Y’know, besides the hiding.”

Wynonna doesn’t know how to press on, honestly. This is brand new territory she isn’t terribly confident in exploring. But for Waverly? Yeah, she’d search the moons of Endor. She’d even walk naked through the deserts of Tatooine.

“I know it sucks, baby girl, but do you think there’s a chance she isn’t ready for the whole town to know about that part of her? You know how word spreads here, how people talk. Soon as one person knows, so does everyone and their mother.”

Yeah, she knows. And she’s only thought about that a trillion times since the whole thing started. Time and again and a-fucking-gain.

Nicole has never seemed the type to be ashamed enough of herself to hide something as special as her own sexuality, not the Nicole that Waverly knows. Not the strong, hardheaded, cocky and prideful motherfucker that she’s been falling for since June. The Nicole who drives with one hand so she can reach over and hold Waverly’s with the other. The Nicole whose eyes go wide with wonder every time she hears Waverly singing under her breath. The girl who boasts boyish outfits and sits with her knees a foot apart. That Nicole, the one who isn’t ashamed of anything except for maybe Waverly. 

There it is again. The dread. Half the reason Waverly still isn’t sure she wants to know the truth. It might hurt more if she did.

So she nods, rubs at her temples, and puffs out an exasperated breath because there’s not much else to do, and, “Yes,” she says. “I’ve thought about that. She’s _so _strong, Wy, and so proud of herself. I can’t imagine her sexuality being the bane of her existence. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Everyone’s got an Achilles’ heel, Waves. Not all of us are as strong as you.”

** _OCTOBER._ **

3:05pm, Friday.

Bell rings.

Waverly’s the first one out of her seat in last period English and out the door before the shrill ring has rounded to a stop. She isn’t sure she retained a single ounce of information the entire day because Nicole’s parents left last night for Palm Springs and she’s got the whole house empty for Waverly and there are few things as valuable as time alone with Nicole.

Wynonna needed the car to go see Doc or Dolls or whichever one of those two boys she isn’t actively mad at this week so Waverly’s on foot down Main Street, walking as fast as she can (she’d run, but, ballet flats) while her thumbs fly even faster across the screen of her phone.

**[3:09pm] WAVERLY: **My history report needs a quick forty minutes of TLC before we do anything else.

**[3:11pm] NICOLE: **yikes

**[3:12pm] WAVERLY: **Ignoring that. Anyway. Report first, then I’ll fix you a snack and we can watch that horror doc you won’t shut up about.

**[3:13pm] NICOLE: **……………………pretty sure cloverfield has never been a documentary

**[3:15pm] WAVERLY: **ANYWAY. I’ll make dinner after that. Cauliflower steaks and deep fried avocado slices and a bottle of wine. Sound good?

**[3:15pm] NICOLE: **what in the sweet hell is a cauliflower steak

**[3:16pm] WAVERLY: **Hush, you’ll like it.

**[3:18pm] NICOLE: **…..so why aren’t you here yet?

**[3:19pm] WAVERLY: **Wynonna has the car. Be there in ten, promise.

She gets there in twelve and Nicole hounds her about the extra minutes all the way from the front door into the living room.

“There goes your perfect attendance record.” Nicole’s teasing comes with a pair of hands finding Waverly’s waist and squeezing and pulling her back against the senior’s front. “Keep it up and you’ll find yourself in a _world _of trouble, missy.”

_“Two _minutes, ’Cole,” Waverly insists, letting her eyes fall shut as Nicole nuzzles into her neck and nips at the warm skin she finds. “And I’m here, aren’t I?”

“You kept me waiting,” the redhead mumbles against her ear, hands drifting along the sliver of skin between Waverly’s blouse and jeans. Nicole loves that spot on her, always so soft. “You’re lucky you look like you do.”

She’s heard that one before. Almost every time she does anything that makes Nicole pout with feigned annoyance. Well. No, Nicole doesn’t pout, she’s too hard for that, but she does something (not really) like it. Her own version where her lips twitch while she tries real hard not to smirk and her lids go heavy but her eyes spark to life and the only question they hold is _why’d you leave me hanging, baby? _Even if it’s only for two minutes. Nicole isn’t dramatic, no, just gets occasionally butthurt-fuckboy dramatic.

It’s cute.

Like when a big hunky dude-bro cries at the end of Toy Story 3 kind of cute. Waverly has no idea how Nicole pulls it off like that, but fuck if it doesn’t work for her.

A lot of things work for Nicole. Too many things.

Waverly would scribble a list but it might take a thousand pages and no one in this town has that kind of time.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Waverly gives in a moment later, turning in Nicole’s arms to face her, looping her arms up around her neck, fingers inching through fiery red locks as their lips meet. It’s soft, this kiss, all delicate maneuvers and gentle tongues meeting in the middle while hands start to wander.

Familiar territory.

“I missed you,” Nicole says against her lips, and it sounds true. True enough for Waverly to let the senior coax her across the room until the back of her knees hit the arm of the couch and they go tumbling down onto the cushions.

“Missed you more.”

“Gonna let you know right now there isn’t a chance in hell I’m letting you spend more than five minutes on that damn project.”

Yeah, that was to be expected. And Waverly doesn’t mind as much as she should, suddenly doesn’t have a care in the world for the Great Escape. Tom, Dick, and Harry can wait.

Fifty-three minutes later she’s stepping out of the shower and into a pair of Nicole’s cotton boy-shorts and pulling an old flannel over her shoulders. She smells like Nicole’s Old Spice shampoo and it’s almost as sweet as tucking into the senior’s neck and taking the scent from its source.

Hello, adorable domestic nonsense.

Nicole’s waiting for her at the kitchen table with her feet kicked up and a can of Blue Ribbon cooling her hand. Loose auburn waves spill over her shoulders and Waverly drifts her fingers through rippling tresses as she ducks in to kiss the top of Nicole’s head.

“Can I get you somethin’ to eat, killer?”

While Nicole tips her head back to peer up at her with a crooked smile and Waverly’s thumbs stroke down along either side of the senior’s jaw a measly inventory of options pans out behind her eyes. Besides what she brought to fix for dinner there isn’t a whole lot to work with. Many of the kitchen cabinets are bare and the fridge is stocked maybe once a month between how often Nicole’s parents dine out and how infrequently the girl eats herself (a terrible habit Waverly is ever insistent on changing). Best she can do for now is probably a dull revival of a grade school sack lunch.

“PB and J?” Nicole asks hopefully. “On the — ”

“Honey wheat. Toasted, almost burnt. Chunky peanut butter. Grape jelly,” Waverly finishes for her, leaning in to lay her lips over the senior’s for a brief moment. “I know how you like ‘em. I’ll see what I can find.”

Nicole grins, reaches up to touch the tip of Waverly’s nose with a fingertip, offers, “No one knows me like you do.”

It’s shit like that, shit like lines straight out of a movie, that make it hard not to fall, that also make it extremely difficult not to believe Nicole feels something for her too.

“Five minutes,” Waverly promises, pecks her lips again, and makes for the fridge.

“Another beer, too, if you wouldn’t mind?” Nicole asks over her shoulder.

“Sure, daddy.”

Two hours and an understanding that Cloverfield is indeed the furthest thing from a documentary later they’re tangled up in Nicole’s bed and halfway through a bottle of merlot. It’s got Waverly’s nerves all tingly and her lips all warm and ready and willing to accept Nicole’s tongue as she licks into her mouth with all the ease and fluidity in the world.

It’s nearly six-thirty and they were supposed to save the bottle of wine for dinner but it’s growing increasingly difficult to want to peel themselves off of one another, so they stay like this. Stay with their lips connected and one of Nicole’s legs slotted between Waverly’s thighs while heavy hands fumble blindly with the buttons on her flannel. They pop open one by one, each undone button baring more and more supple skin until Nicole thumbs the last one and the shirt falls open over Waverly’s chest.

Damn central air (Nicole likes it cold) has her nipples stiffening in an instant and draws the flush down from her cheeks to her throat where it dwindles out somewhere around her collarbones. Contrast is high between the chill of the air and the burn of Nicole’s hand as it skirts her ribcage, as it ascends on her chest, as Waverly gasps when a nipple catches against Nicole’s palm when the senior drags her hand over Waverly’s breast. 

She’s allowed to touch Nicole now, when they’re like this, when they’re still level with each other. Slim fingers thread through red locks and tug, hard.

Waverly rolls her hips against Nicole’s thigh, takes the pressure with a whine, and whimpers for more.

Before she can close her lips over Nicole’s tongue to coax it back into the depths of her mouth the senior abandons the kiss to drag her mouth down the length of Waverly’s throat, stops to nip at her collarbone, tug at the skin with her teeth, and grin against the bite.

“I can feel you,” Nicole starts in, resonant and low, like a rumble of thunder on the horizon. Her hand falls from Waverly’s chest to the familiar curve of her rear and kneads at the cotton-covered flesh, uses her grip as leverage to pull her hips down, presses her thigh up firm against Waverly’s core, continues, “How wet you are. You always get so wet, _so _easily. How does it make you feel — making a mess of yourself while you’re wearing my underwear?”

Embarrassed, though it’s nothing new, she’s done it before, and yet. Shy, always shy, which Nicole loves, but still eager to press on, still eager to play, to please. Desperate, half of which her body accounts for with the ease of arousal, other half showcased by all the little noises she can’t ever seem to keep in.

But mostly —

“Dirty,” Waverly whispers, unable and largely unwilling yet to meet the taunting gaze she knows is waiting for her the moment she opens her eyes. “You know it makes me feel dirty.”

“Look at me.”

And Waverly knows Nicole will make her pay for it if she doesn’t, knows she’s better off facing this humiliation than the next, so she does. Takes her time though, slowly blinks her eyes open, lingers on Nicole’s lips a moment before drawing up to meet the fire in her eyes.

There’s a moment where they just stare, locked in. Nicole’s gaze is teasing and heavy, boring into Waverly’s shy and wide and expectant eyes. It’s hard to not look away, hard to discern just what Nicole’s thinking, hard to even breathe without acknowledging the steady throb between her legs and the burn in her cheeks. The senior drags it out an endless ten seconds until she’s sure the cheerleader won’t drift off.

It’s a silent command. 

_Stay._

And stay she always will.

So stay she does, bottom lip tucked between her teeth, lids heavy and threatening to droop over cloudy eyes.

Nicole doesn’t break, doesn’t lose her gaze for even a millisecond, never falters, she’s good like that. Her mouth scales the plane of Waverly’s collarbone, lips part, tongue strokes over sun-kissed skin.

It’s when her eyes go dark as thunderclouds and her mouth twists into a wicked smirk that Waverly’s breath catches in her throat, but that’s nothing. Nothing compared to the whine that tears from her lips when Nicole scrapes her teeth over a nipple, catches it between pearly whites, tugs, and latches on.

And her rational brain knows she shouldn’t look away, knows Nicole wants her to hold tight, to ride out the vigor that is forcing her eyes open and keeping them steady. Her irrational brain wants her to let loose, take it easy, thread her fingers through Nicole’s messy hair and hold on for the ride while she still can, before Nicole goes south of the border and orders her hands up under her head.

What Nicole wants, at the end of the day, yeah, Nicole gets. Waverly doesn’t let herself falter.

She hates how good Nicole looks half-dressed and tucked up against her front, hates how easy it is for Nicole to pull her down the path of no return, hates how little it takes for her own body to respond and adapt to whatever the senior needs.

Waverly Earp is capable of anything, anything under the sun, not a soul would contest it.

Yet there is not a bone in her body that is willing to or capable of hating anything that is Nicole Haught.

When she hates how good Nicole looks in various states of undress, when she hates how quick she is to become putty in Nicole’s hands, it’s never true. In those moments the dictionary definition of ‘hate’ is greatly skewed, is so quickly ignored, and can be replaced entirely by one single word: love.

To admit to loving someone who may never love you back is a doozy, sure, so she pretends its hate while knowing it could never be anything so vile.

To love is to live.

And with Nicole she finds no greater feeling than that of being alive.

** _NOVEMBER._ **

It happens by accident.

It happens in the middle of a ball of fluff, in the middle of the night, in the middle of Waverly curled up into Nicole, head tucked into her neck, lips against the base of her throat. They’ve been drinking, they’ve always been drinking, but this time is different somehow.

Different, maybe, because it’s never left Waverly feeling so heavy. While time drags on at a pace even a snail could outrun there is nothing she craves more than to tell Nicole she loves her. Really loves her, like Westley loves Buttercup. And she’s still falling, but with nothing sturdy to grab onto before she hits the ground. Maybe, because it’d be easier, because she’d wake up with less internal conflict, this will be one of those binges you wake up from without without remembering the last thing you remember.

The last thing Waverly remembers at first is tucking into Nicole, nuzzling in close, drawing her scent from the source. She remembers it going straight to her head.

The last thing Nicole remembers is Waverly’s hand over her heart, Waverly’s lips against her neck, the comforting presence of a warm body nestled against her own.

They sleep for maybe six hours, maybe a bit more, but they passed out around sundown. Which was maybe six pm.

Waverly remembers waking up at maybe one am, sort of, because when she _really _wakes up at eleven it all feels like a slice of a dream. She remembers curling into Nicole, tucking her knee over the senior’s hip, taking a handful of the redhead’s shirt in her fist and holding fast. She remembers lifting her chin to kiss Nicole’s throat, remembers mumbling sweet nothings against her skin.

At noon Waverly remembers what happened in the middle of the night.

She remembers gracing her lips over Nicole’s jaw, remembers how steady her smile held, and then remembers the worst.

They were still curled up into one another when Waverly dropped a hand to Nicole’s hip and tugged at her shirt, willed her closer.

“’M so lucky you’re mine,” she finally remembers whispering, remembers the words coming out a little wobbly, a little unsteady.

She remembers Nicole not reacting at first, remembers how nice it was lying on Nicole’s chest.

It was so nice.

Nice until Nicole processed what she’d said, until Nicole felt the weight of the words.

The senior had her up after that, within seconds, two firm hands against Waverly’s shoulders, pushing her back.

“I’ve _told _you,” Nicole started in, almost glaring (it was more disappointed than a glare, also less angry than, mostly exasperated) at her. “You can’t — shit, you just, you _can’t. _I’ve told you.”

And Waverly was half asleep, drifting in and out of a state of wake, trying her damn best to hang on to every word that left Nicole’s lips. Because when Nicole speaks, Waverly knows it’s important to listen.

Nicole shook her, gently, by the shoulders, wrenched her from the last claws of sleep. Waverly still felt the whiskey in her system, was awake but not sober, not yet, but she tried her best. She always will for Nicole.

“I told you,” Nicole said again, pressed on, “You can call me Nicky, you can call me ’Cole. You can call me ‘baby,’ you can call me ‘love.’ All of the above.”

Waverly’s doing her best to listen, doing her best to keep her eyes from blinking shut and letting sleep swallow her whole again.

“But,” Nicole warns her, fingertips digging into Waverly’s shoulders, hard. “I told you. Just don’t call me yours. Don’t. Call me anything you want, anything but that.”

Waverly’s asleep again before Nicole finishes.

When the memory finally comes back to her she pretends not to remember, but she could never forget.

Waverly won’t make that mistake again.

** _DECEMBER._ **

It’s an easy month.

Nothing noteworthy.

Waverly sees Nicole when Nicole lets her.

They have time alone when it’s granted, they have time to progress (towards nothing) when time permits. It’s a little twisted, a little messy, but that’s nothing if not normal for them.

December is a dull month.

Again, nothing noteworthy.

It passes by quick; there are greater things at work. 

** _JANUARY._ **

First week of January Nicole throws herself a birthday party and doesn’t invite Waverly. Which, okay, no, is not true — she told her she could come, but also told her it was only going to be a bunch of upperclassmen and might not be her scene. And they wouldn’t get any time alone. So Waverly starts to think Nicole would rather her sit this one out.

Which is fine. Totally fine.

Friday nights she usually spends on the couch with Wynonna and takeout from the only Chinese restaurant in town, so it’s not a huge deal.

Not a huge deal at all until Friday rolls around and Waverly’s getting back from an evening at the arcade with Jeremy and Rosita and comes home to find Wynonna suiting up to go out.

“You’re leaving?” Waverly asks, disappointment creeping into her tone. “But we were gonna watch Wonder Woman.”

“I’m sorry, baby girl,” Wynonna consoles, pulling Waverly in to press a kiss to her forehead. “Last minute birthday party invite from one of the meatheads. Couldn’t say no.”

Disappointment is suddenly forgotten because who else in this Podunk-ass town could possibly be throwing a birthday party on the same night as Nicole? And since when are she and Wynonna friends? Because Wynonna Earp does not make an appearance at a party for just anyone.

“Oh?” Waverly sheds her coat and hangs it by the door. “Anyone I know?”

“Nah,” Wynonna brushes off. “Just the chick who sells Doc his weed.”

Well, that’s news.

“So it’s Doc this week, huh?” Deflecting is easy.

“I think it’s going to be Doc for a while now.”

“Have you finally mastered the art of monogamy or is this a body-snatcher situation?”

To rephrase: deflecting is easy when your sister plays boys like musical chairs until there’s only one left.

“Ha-_ha. _Don’t wait up, okay? I’ll be back late.”

“Have fun,” Waverly tells her. It’s halfhearted.

It takes her twenty minutes after Wynonna’s gone to talk herself out of texting Nicole, to convince herself it doesn’t matter that Wynonna’s at her birthday part and she’s stuck at the homestead. Aggravation would be easy, so she settles into ambivalence. Ambivalence and alcohol borrowed from Wynonna’s sock drawer.

Two am Waverly gets a string of texts from Nicole that she’s wide awake to receive because she’s never been good at not waiting up for Wynonna.

**[2:02am] NICOLE: **you’re very beautiful you know

**[2:02am] NICOLE: **all the little browns in your hair and the turns they take

**[2:03am] NICOLE: **if you think about it

**[2:03am] NICOLE: **if you think about it there are so many worlds

** [2:03am] NICOLE: **right there

**[2:04am] NICOLE: **if you just look down

And she’s not sure what to say to any of that at first, not sure if she should ask Nicole what she’s on, or take the compliment for what it is. Which is what? Waverly doesn’t for the life of her know where to start with this one. Doesn’t understand even half of what Nicole is trying to say to her.

So she waits ten minutes.

**[2:15am] WAVERLY: **How drunk are you, birthday girl?

** [2:17am] NICOLE: **3

** [2:17am] WAVERLY: **Out of what?

** [2:24am] NICOLE: **no

**[2:25am] NICOLE: **i am just laying here

**[2:25am] NICOLE: **just laying here with a notebook and a pen

**[2:26am] NICOLE: **trying to fit five minutes into a millisecond

**[2:27am] NICOLE: **because there are so many stories i don’t know yet

And because there’s no way in hell Nicole is any kind of sober, and because Waverly’s blood is alive with Rich & Rare, and she still has no idea what Nicole is on about, she shows her hand.

**[2:29am] WAVERLY: **Really wish I could’ve been there tonight.

It goes unnoticed.

**[2:31am] NICOLE: **if i had enough time to handwrite the iliad backwards

**[2:31am] WAVERLY: **No idea what that means but okay.

**[2:33am] NICOLE: **i think it means you’re fine as hell

**[2:33am] NICOLE: **something worth centuries

**[2:33am] NICOLE: **i hope that means as much to you as i intend

Waverly’s first though thought is _I’m falling in love with the biggest idiot in Purgatory._

_Shit _is her second. _Did I just — ?_

The third is somewhere between _fuck me, this is bad _and _must be a whole lot more drunk than intended._

So she goes to bed instead of digging herself in deeper with Nicole. Doesn’t matter that it was the senior spilling oddly charming (mostly odd) praise, forget that she didn’t get to see Nicole on her birthday, go on and disregard that even Wynonna was invited to the party. It’s a lot for one night and Waverly’s asleep before her head hits the pillow.

Next day Nicole doesn’t wake up until mid-afternoon.

Waverly’s putting the finishing touches on wrapping her gift when the senior calls. It’s a quarter past five and Waverly would have worried if she hadn’t woken up to a slew of texts that didn’t peter out until seven that morning.

“Welcome back to the land of the living.”

There’s been no sign of Wynonna yet that afternoon but her door’s been closed all day and Waverly assumes she’s sleeping off whatever the hell went on last night.

“Guess who’s all grown up?”

“Tom Hanks?” Waverly asks without humor while a smirk clings to her lips.

“You’re the worst.”

“Yeah, but you dig me.”

“Listen. . .” Nicole starts in, suddenly not so sunny. “I tried to get out of it, but my parents won’t let me off the hook from this whole birthday dinner bullshit.”

Waverly deflates, shoulders slumping. She lays back in her spot, stretches out on the floor, and tries her damn best not to sound too dejected as she mumbles, “So you can’t see me tonight?”

“Tomorrow. I promise.”

And Waverly so wants to tell her not to make promises she can’t keep because Nicole has a history of making plans, pushing them to the next day an hour before they’re supposed to link up, and once again doing the same the very next day. That she’d rather suffer her own emotions than risk upsetting Nicole probably says more than Waverly is ready to acknowledge.

“Tomorrow,” Waverly echoes.

“I’ll text you.”

Nicole does, to her credit, and they go back and forth about everything and nothing until Waverly falls headfirst into her copy of Edith Hamilton’s _Mythology _and doesn’t resurface until she realizes there’s no more light coming in through the window.

Ten-forty pm.

A good a time as any to make dinner. She leaves the book open on her pillow and makes for Wynonna’s still-shut door, knocks softly.

“Wynonna? Do you want anything to eat?”

Nothing.

Waverly knocks again, louder now.

“You alive in there, Wy?”

Still nothing.

No more knocks; Waverly pushes the door open and finds — nothing. An empty bedroom with an unmade bed and absolutely no sign of an Earp. It’s not all that surprising, truly, Wynonna rarely keeps regular hours and often treats the homestead something like a locker room where quick changes and showers are most of what you do there.

**[10:43pm] WAVERLY: **Did you go out again? I’m about to make dinner, so I’ll leave a plate for you in the fridge. Please please please eat when you get home.

Some ten minutes later she stands at the stove and texts with one hand:

**[10:54pm] WAVERLY: **Helloooo? Anybody out there? Would love to know if my sister’s alive.

Twenty minutes and a bowl and a half of spaghetti and four fingers of whiskey later and Wynonna still hasn’t texted back. And Waverly knows it’s a long shot, knows full well Wynonna doesn’t answer the phone unless she’s expecting a boy or a pizza, but tries anyway.

Straight to voicemail.

“Hey, dummy. Charge your phone. And call me back before I file a missing persons report.”

A text to Doc, just in case:

**[11:15pm] WAVERLY: **If you’re with my sister could you have her call me please?

Eleven-thirty pm and all Waverly’s got is radio silence.

Somewhere in-between the kitchen and the living room she realizes the drive’s been empty since the night before, since Wynonna left for Nicole’s; no sign of the truck. Unless she rolled through for a pit stop before Waverly woke up, but Wynonna awake before noon on a Saturday is about as likely as coming across a clean-shaven Doc.

By midnight Waverly’s borrowed the last of Wynonna’s whiskey and devoured the last pint of mint chip in the freezer and doesn’t know anymore if her concern is justified. She knows her sister better than anyone, always has, always will, and is more than acquainted with Wynonna’s habit of staying out for days at a time, but she always tells Waverly beforehand if it’ll be a while. She always texts. 

Radio silence is new and _not _noteworthy because it’s worrisome and grueling and it’s starting to gnaw at Waverly’s brain with jagged teeth. At first a joke, a missing persons report is starting to feel like a logical next step. It _has _been over twenty-four hours — that’s the mark, right?

Might not be the best move to get on the phone with the cops after four drinks in the middle of the night, though.

Doesn’t help that she’s heard nothing back from Doc.

On a whim she tries Dolls.

**[12:09am] WAVERLY: **Have you seen Wynonna by any chance?

And Dolls, like the pillar of reliability he is, pings back within seconds.

**[12:10am] DOLLS: **Not since last night. Everything OK?

**[12:10am] WAVERLY: **I think so. I hope so.

**[12:11am] DOLLS: **Call if you need anything. I’ll be up.

So she tries Wynonna a second time and gets sent straight to voicemail again. Then a third time. And a fourth. All the same, not a single ring. She doesn’t leave any more messages, all the good they’d do.

Somewhere in the midst of pacing the floor plan and taking station on the porch with her arms crossed she goes and pulls one of Ward’s old shotguns out of the barn because nothing makes a lone Earp feel better in crisis than a trusty firearm at their side.

One am comes around and Waverly’s feeling the heat, feeling the fatigue, feeling the need to curl up and tuck her head in and surrender to the claws of sleep, give herself over to her dreams, throw the white flag up. She’s sprawled out on the couch _almost _cuddling Ward’s shotgun and blinking excessively to try and keep her eyes open and trying no to chew at her fingernails to dampen the stress.

Two am she calls Nicole.

Calls Nicole, who doesn’t answer the first time around.

Or the second.

Or the third.

But the fourth is answered with a groggy “He…llo?”

“Nicole? I’m — I’m sorry, I hate to wake you, but I’m about ready to lose my mind and I didn’t know who else to call.”

“Waverly? What’s goin’ on? You okay?”

Waverly chokes on her breath, teeth catching against her bottom lip, chest heaving, and she shakes her head even though Nicole can’t see her.

“I don’t know where Wynonna is,” she admits, tugging at her own shirt. “I haven’t seen her since she left for your party.”

And they haven’t talked about _that, _about the fact that Wynonna was in attendance and Waverly was left at home with nothing to do but burrow into her emotions, but they’re not going to talk about that right now. There’s a bigger picture that demands attention and they’re going to pour all they have into that.

Nicole sounds sleepy, sounds a bit delirious, like she’s wrenching herself from a deep sleep, as she tries, “You sure she isn’t with Doc? Crashing at his place or something?”

But, “No,” Waverly insists, exasperated. “No. No, she’s not. She’d answer, she’d text me. Doc would’ve gotten back to me, he would’ve made sure I knew she’s okay. Neither of them are answering and I’m _scared_, ‘Cole.” Waverly almost doesn’t want to say the next part, but she’s got to. Doesn’t really have a choice. “I need you. Please.”

There’s a brief pause on the other end of the line, maybe five seconds.

“All right,” Nicole tells her. “I’ll be there in twenty.”

She’s there in twenty-six.

Waverly’s out the door and crashing into Nicole’s arms the second the senior abandons her truck, nuzzling into her warmth, settling into her familiar smell of vanilla and spice, drawing resilience from her strength, finally thinking _okay _this whole thing might turn out all right.

“Thank you,” she mumbles, tips her head aside to lay her ear over Nicole’s chest, searching for her heartbeat.

“Have I done something worthy of a thanks?”

Waverly sighs as she finds the steady thrum, the beat that grounds her. “Yes,” she says. “You’re here.”

They stand wrapped up in each other in the front yard until Waverly starts to shiver because she hadn’t cared to grab a coat on the way out and the icy January air is having its fun nipping at her skin in harsh little bites.

“Come on,” Nicole mutters, coaxing her towards the porch. “Let’s get you outta the cold, okay?”

It’s not much warmer inside; the heating at the homestead has never been anything but shoddy, but it’s something. It’s home.

Nicole eyes the empty handle on the kitchen table beside the loaded shotgun, doesn’t say anything at first, but gives Waverly a look, brows raised.

“You planning on goin’ gunslinger tonight?”

“Shut up,” Waverly chides, reaches for her hand, starts to pull her toward the living room because cozying up is easier on a couch than at a table and Waverly needs to be wrapped up in Nicole if she wants to even attempt thinking straight. “You know I don’t like being here alone for so long.”

It’s the most natural move in the world to tuck herself between Nicole’s legs and lean back against her front and grab for her hands to pull her arms around her like a blanket.

They sit like that, tucked into each other, with Waverly’s head tipped back on Nicole’s shoulder, and Nicole’s hands in Waverly’s lap because messing with the senior’s fingers always seems to settle her down.

“So. . . what happened?” Nicole asks. “What’s happening?”

So Waverly dives into her spiel again: no sight or sound of Wynonna since she left Friday night, no texts back, straight to voicemail every time. Doc, too.

“Dolls got back to me, but he doesn’t know anything either.”

“She and Doc left together, that much I can assure you. So what’s the move here, Waves? Sitting around all night and stewing in it won’t do you any good.”

Waverly chews on her bottom lip, shakes her head, tugs gently at Nicole’s thumb, brushes her own over the senior’s knuckles, shrugs. “Would it be totally batshit to report her missing?”

And Nicole actually laughs, basically snorts, catches herself at the last moment, and clears her throat. “To the cops?”

“No, to the Prime Minister’s office,” Waverly deadpans, desperate, eyes wide and pleading with Nicole to take her seriously. _“Yes, _to the cops, Nicole.” And that’s the first time she’s ever taken that tone with Nicole (the harsh, ready-to-fight, rushed one) and by the looks of it the redhead is just as displeased with it as Waverly is with herself for going there. “. . . Sorry.”

Silence reigns momentarily; Waverly didn’t need to apologize, so Nicole won’t acknowledge it, just nods and moves on.

“Okay,” Nicole says after a beat. “Okay. You know her better than I do.”

The whiskey begs Waverly to bite back with _I didn’t know you knew her at all _but there are some things better left unsaid.

Waverly goes back to chewing at her bottom lip and looks down at her lap. There are always so many things she wants to say to Nicole that she can never muster the courage to. It’s all a message in a bottle with no ocean to carry it to shore. Instead she fishes her phone from a pocket, looks at it, huffs, and shoves it at Nicole, says, “You do it.”

“Me?” Nicole’s brows raise with uncertainty.

Sputtering, exasperated again, Waverly pushes the phone into Nicole’s hands. “I can’t get on the phone with the police right now! I’m — ” a shake of the head, then, “. . . boozy.”

Nicole surrenders with a “fine” and takes Waverly’s phone, calls up the number for the station, hits dial.

One ring.

Two.

Three.

_“Purgatory Sheriff’s Department, this is Lonnie. How may I direct your call?”_

“I’d like to report, uh. . .” Nicole looks at Waverly for confirmation, which comes in the form of a nod. “Missing person?”

_“Is that a question, ma’am?”_

“Damn it, no,” Nicole grumbles. “My friend. My friend is missing.”

_“And does your friend have a name?”_

“Wynonna Earp.”

Waverly’s been listening, head at a tilt, ear inclined toward the phone clutched in Nicole’s hand, hanging on every word while her heart’s stilled in her chest. It picks up its beat again when the voice on the end of the line huffs something between a laugh and a grunt.

_“No need. We’ve got her celled for obstructing a peace officer.”_

Waverly shoots up in Nicole’s lap, turns the best she can, eyes wide with relief.

_“Three-hundred dollars bail, two-fifty fine for the crime. You’re more than welcome to come spring her. We’ll be here.”_

“Thank you,” Nicole tells him, reaches for Waverly’s back, coasts a calming hand along her spine, and hangs up.

“Can we go get her?” Waverly rushes out the second Nicole’s off the phone. She’s got a rubber-banded bundle of cash in the back of her closet for emergencies that’ll probably cover the charge, and can always go digging through Wynonna’s shit if it won’t.

It takes a moment but, “Yeah,” Nicole says. “Yeah, all right. Let’s go get the girl.” 

Elsewhere, a bit later:

Wynonna Earp is mostly comfortable. The holding cell they’ve got her in has a concrete slab for a cot, which is fine, hell on her back, but fine. Lonnie brings her water when she asks, which is nice. She’s still dehydrated and sore and her brain is screaming for a hot shower, but she’s handled worse. Silence is most of her company, which she doesn’t mind, misses Doc’s stupid slow drawl in her ear, but it’s fine. 

It’s all fine.

Everything’s fine.

She’ll get out of there one way or another.

She’s lying with her cheek pressed to the concrete, arm dangling over the edge of the excuse for a cot, mumbling the theme song to The Mary Tyler Moore Show to drown out the incessant buzz of the fluorescents overhead, when Lonnie strolls in with his keys at the ready and a bounce in his step.

“What’s happening?” Wynonna asks, forcing herself up with a groan, as Lonnie pops open the cell door. “Where’s the fire?”

“You’re free to go, Earp. Bail and fine have been paid in full.”

“What?”

“You deaf? Get the hell out of my station.”

He doesn’t need to tell her twice. Wynonna hightails it out of the cell and makes for the exit, but doesn’t make it all the way.

There’s a human waiting for her.

A very grumpy looking red-headed human perched on a seat outside of the cop shop offices with her head in her hands and her heel bouncing like it’s ready to run a race. Wynonna stops in her tracks.

“Haught?”

Nicole looks up with the best (okay, half-assed) smile she can muster. “I got you, Earp.”

“You bailed me out?”

“Let’s go,” Nicole suggests in place of an answer, rising and lifting her chin towards the door.

So they go.

Out into the crisp air of a cruel night, off to where Nicole left her truck at the curb. Where Waverly waits slumped against the hood with her arms over her chest and her eyes glued on the door of the station.

And Wynonna isn't sure what she's supposed to make of her sister out there waiting for her, isn't sure what she's supposed to think about Nicole and Waverly teaming up to spring her from a cell in the middle of the night, unless — no. No_, no, _she won't entertain that thought. Won't for a second believe that Nicole of all people has been the one keeping Waverly strung up on a line of empty promises and bullshit excuses. She'd like to think she knows Nicole better than that. She'd like to think Waverly knows better than to go and give herself to someone so unwilling to commit, someone so dead-set on maintaining their freedom because it’s the only thing she truly has control of.

Maybe Wynonna isn't as good a judge of character as she once thought.

“You two know each other?”

Her eyes tear back and forth between Nicole and Waverly, challenging either of them to an admission, until she zeroes in on Waverly (who doesn't want to look at her, would give an arm and a leg not to have to look her in the eye again because she’s afraid all she’ll find is disappointment, but forces herself to in the end), and suddenly she sees.

She knows.

And she’s not always so quick to understand what looks mean, more often than not needs people to tell her outright what they need from her, but a look is all it takes for Wynonna to discern how Waverly needs her to react right now.

Outwardly, she gives away nothing.

Just throws herself at her sister, slings her arms around Waverly's shoulders, pulling the girl snug against her chest.

"I'll kill her," Wynonna mumbles against Waverly's ear. "I'll kill that jackass so fast she won’t even see it coming.”

“Not if I kill you first,” Waverly clips back under her breath, grasping at the worn leather of her sister’s jacket with all the strength of a vise. It only lasts a few beats before Waverly eases off to give Wynonna a weak shove. “You worried the_ shit _out of me, I hope you know. I was scared, Wy, I thought something bad happened.”

“Well. . .” Wynonna stretches the word out, grasping for an explanation at the back of her mind, comes up empty. She’s still trying to wrap her head around Nicole taking advantage of her baby sister. Still trying to talk herself down from getting her hands on one of Ward’s old shotguns and blowing a hole through five feet and nine inches of _dumbass. _

It’s quiet for a minute, until it isn’t.

The Earp sisters have fallen beneath a dome of their own, closed off from the world, with Nicole just barely on the outskirts.

Waverly breaks the barrier a moment later.

“You,” she starts, jutting a forefinger at her sister, “And you,” she says, pointing at Nicole next, “Both of you. In the car. Now.”

And neither of them are prepared to face the wrath of Waverly Earp, so they go, Nicole in the driver’s seat, Wynonna in the passenger’s, and Waverly perched in the backseat.

The drive to the homestead passes in loaded silence.

Wynonna hates it.

Waverly tolerates it.

Nicole focuses on the road to avoid thinking about the quiet.

When they finally roll up to the homestead Nicole juts a thumb toward the back of the truck.

“There’s a handle of Jack back there,” she says to Wynonna. “It’s yours it if you need it.”

She will.

Wynonna snags the bottle and grabs Waverly by the sleeve and drags her out of the car.

Not tonight, no, not now is she about to let her baby sister have a moment alone with Nicole. Not if she can help it. She still ain’t ready for that, ain’t ready to _not _throw hands at Nicole, so she persists.

They leave Nicole to watch them disappear into the homestead, arm in arm.

It’s all there is to do.

** _FEBRUARY._ **

“I know we’ve been getting close,” that’s what Nicole says.

And Waverly doesn't want to hear it, knows where this is going. Wants to plug her ears with her fingers and screw her eyes shut and wish it all away.

“We can’t get any closer,” that’s what Nicole says next. “You’ll get it when you’re older.”

But she doesn’t get it now, has never understood Nicole’s aversion to being an _us _or being in love or being anything more than whatever they are. With emotions heavy enough to sink a ship, almost enough to want to put an end to what they’ve been building up to (which is what — ?), Waverly forces herself to nod.

This can’t go any further, that’s what Nicole means.

Well.

Not exactly.

Can’t go any further than it already has, can’t get any closer than they already are, that’s what she means.

They can stay as they are, or they can go their separate ways.

Because now Nicole suspects that Wynonna knows, now she’s nine miles past pissed, and doesn’t know what to do with her anger other than let it destroy something good.

No one was supposed to know.

It had to have been that damn night at the station. Waverly should have stayed behind at the homestead, but then she’d have been there alone even longer and Nicole didn’t want to do that to her. So maybe there is a small part of her that knows how to feel something.

Rationally, yes, of course she feels something for Waverly. She would have left months ago if she didn’t.

No part of her knows why she’s let this go on for so long.

Focus.

It had to have been the night at the station because Wynonna hasn’t been the same around her since. They’ve only known each other three years, she knows how Wynonna is with people that rub her the wrong way. And Nicole’s been getting more than her fair share of tight-lipped smiles and one-word answers and they haven’t hung out outside of school since that fucking night at the station. She should have made Waverly wait at the homestead.

Lunchtime on a Tuesday and Nicole’s alone at her usual table, waiting for the rest of the crew to roll through the lunch line and join her. She’s praying for Dolls or Doc or hell, even Mercedes, to get there first, but of course they don’t.

Of course it’s Wynonna.

Wynonna, who sets her tray down a little too hard as she drops into her seat, who flashes Nicole a forced smile and doesn’t say a word until Doc and Dolls fall in on either side of her.

None of them speak for more time than has ever been comfortable.

Wynonna breaks the silence, finally, horribly, with a question Nicole would rather dig herself a six-foot hole than answer:

“All right, Haught. What’s good in your life these days? Been seeing anybody?”

Dolls has a backbone, that much Nicole can vouch for, but he won’t get in the way of a Wynonna Earp tirade. Doc has less of one, Nicole knows, when it comes to Wynonna; he’s whipped and the world knows it.

“Anyone special on your docket?” Wynonna pushes when she doesn’t get an immediate answer.

Would it be worse to lie or to pick up her shit and walk away?

Both would be met with an equal amount of hostility, Nicole realizes. What’s the lesser of the evils in this case? Stay and risk Wynonna ripping her a new one, leave and risk Wynonna hunting her down and putting her in the ground.

“No,” Nicole says after a moment, letting Wynonna’s eyes bore into her own and praying she betrays nothing but neutrality. “No special someone.”

Across the table Wynonna grits her teeth, squares her jaw, and Nicole swears this is all more than she bargained for. So she gets up and goes. Dumps her tray in the garbage and doesn’t look back.

Nicole ditches last period history to smoke under the bleachers, to gear herself up for what she needs to do to protect herself.

Protect herself from what?

A can of worms she hasn’t been ready to open since Shae left her.

Since Shae left her for being too focused on her own future, for daring to dream bigger than this shitty town.

Nicole knows why Shae left her, thinks it’s some of the dumbest shit she’s ever heard.

Shae left her because Nicole wouldn’t pour every single ounce of herself into their relationship. Because she wouldn’t devote herself to a relationship that wasn’t going to last anyway. Shae wanted someone at her beck and call, someone by her side at every minute of any given day. Shae wanted a codependent and Nicole was unwilling to give her one. So Shae dropped her, which was fine. Better for Nicole in the end, yeah, but it might’ve fucked her up a little. Might’ve left her feeling like no relationship is worth it if she can’t control every single aspect of it.

She finds Waverly after the final bell, pulls her aside, drags her around the back of the gymnasium.

Nicole doesn’t want to do this, not with the way Waverly looks at her with nothing but innocent questions in her eyes. Doesn’t want to do this because she’s probably not ready to lose another person, but are you really losing them if you’re the one forcing them away?

“Your sister knows,” Nicole says simply, avoids Waverly’s eyes as she lights a cigarette.

If she cared to look she’d see Waverly avoiding her eyes right back, she’d see her hyper-focusing on the ground, the dirt under her shoes. If she cared she’d see Waverly tugging at the hem of her jacket, desperate and looking for a way out.

It takes a minute for either of them to say anything. Silence is easy to let hang between them, it’s easy to hand it the reins.

“I know,” Waverly admits after what feels like hours.

“You know,” Nicole repeats, finally finding it in herself to level her gaze at the girl standing before her. Cheeks hollow around the cigarette, brows screw together as she works the whole thing out, and a beat later she lets a stream of smoke spill out the corner of her mouth. “You told her.”

And it’s not so much an accusation as it is a fact, because they both know. Nicole understands now, understands why Wynonna looked at her the way she did when they left the station to find Waverly waiting for them, understands why Wynonna hasn’t acted the same toward her since, understands it all. Her jaw squares tight, gaze goes heavy, free hand clenches to a fist at her side like she’s ready to throw down.

“I. . .” Waverly shakes her head, prays this is a dream. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Didn’t mean to? Didn’t _mean _to?” Nicole’s hands are up by her shoulders, outstretched, gesticulating harshly and sharp, like the words she spews are nothing but _so fucking obvious. _At this point there’s no turning back. “How thick is your fucking skull that you went and did the _one _thing I asked you not to and you have the balls to come back and tell me you didn’t _mean _to? _Huh?!”_

Waverly tries: “Nicole, I — ”

“No,” Nicole cuts her off with, shakes her head, and again, “No. Lose my number. Don’t text, don’t call. This is done.”

And it stings, yeah, burns hot through her eyes, bores straight into her heart, starts to drag her down quick. Makes it worse not having a say in it, not feeling like you have a place to argue against something that’s going to affect you so deeply, but Nicole won’t give her that platform.

Waverly tries, to her credit; she grabs at Nicole’s arm when the senior turns to go, wrenches her back, fingertips digging into the cotton sleeve of her shirt. She’s not prepared to let go with her hands, and it’s going to be harder to do with her heart. This isn’t enough for her to close the book on, she needs more, needs an ending that doesn’t feel like shards of glass piercing every inch of her skin.

“Don’t do this,” she begs, pleads, tries to pull Nicole in by her hand. “Please.”

“This is done,” Nicole echoes, cold.

“But I love you,” Waverly admits, quiet as a whisper, a last ditch effort, an admission she was never supposed to surrender. “_Please_, Nicole.”

Waverly doesn’t know the Nicole that answers, has never heard her take that tone, has never seen her eyes harden to the point of no return, never seen her posture so rigid, so closed off. And for all it’s worth she never wants to see that Nicole again, the Nicole that levels with her, head inclined, rips her wrist from her grasp, and spits out:

“And I won't ever love you." It sounds so simple. So final." I said we’re _done.”_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> summary doesn't apply to this chapter but i left it bc this part wasn't supposed to happen but y'all heathens wore me down. it's two-thirty am and i skimmed for errors but i am not legally responsible for any that slipped by but anyway here have this.

** _EIGHT YEARS LATER_ **

Nicole Haught was never supposed to come back to Purgatory.

When she graduated high school and hightailed it to Toronto with Mercedes Gardner of all people she wasn’t even planning to go to college. And she didn’t, not at first, and not in the traditional way when she did.

She spent two years bumming around the city and freeloading from Mercedes’s spare bedroom before she started to feel like a parasite in a city with so many opportunities.

There were parties, there was a general lack of authority, and for a while Nicole thrived on it. It was what she was used to, being left to her own devices. It was nice for a while, fulfilling for a time, until she realized all she was truly doing was consuming. Until everything started to feel heavy, like she was carrying a weight she was never meant to bear, like she was drowning under a bed of graces laid out for her when she had nothing to offer in return.

It was nice until —

_Gretta._

_They met in one of Toronto’s seediest gay bars maybe three months after Nicole rolled into town, a spot called Glory Hole, that catered mostly to lesbian bikers and anyone wanting to disappear for the night. Nicole was four joints into a customary solo bar crawl when she ended up in the Hole. Tequila-soaked and ready to fall into bed with a stranger, that’s the Nicole that walked into the bar that night._

_Nicole didn’t know she was halfway strung out when they met, only knew Gretta was stunning and interested and old enough to buy nineteen-year-old Nicole drinks at the bars that wouldn’t serve her._

_They were a match made in Hell, that’s what Mercedes would say some time later, but the nice side of Hell where there are still suburbs and good schools and cocktail parties._

_Nicole held the belt in height but Gretta carried herself taller than anyone else in the Hole that night. She wore a fringed suede jacket and jeans so tight you could tell a quarter heads from tails in her back pocket and she pounced on Nicole like a jungle cat on its prey. Told her she was too pretty to be in a dump like this and grinned something wicked when Nicole reminded her that she too was in the joint. They were good with back and forth, good with each other at first._

_They were good when they crashed into Nicole and Mercedes’s apartment at dawn that morning, good when for the first time in her life, at sunrise, Nicole Haught bottomed._

_Still good a month later when Mercedes threw a dinner party and Nicole and Gretta snuck out to the balcony to be under the stars and do a few less than kosher things under a picnic blanket._

_Even five months after that when Gretta’s sister died suddenly and she asked if she could crash for a few days, they were good._

_A few days turned into a week, a week into two, two into three months, and Nicole started to notice things._

_Things like Gretta had an unusually long morning shower routine and half the time her hair was still dry even when she’d had the water running. Or how she always disappeared around the same times every day: once at lunchtime, again mid-afternoon, once more after dark, and she never came back the same. Was always zoning in and out heavy and had trouble keeping her thoughts straight and always needed help getting out of her clothes before rolling into bed._

_Nicole didn’t want to pry, they were good._

_They had a routine. Wake up late, eat something greasy. Nicole read while Gretta sketched, mostly scribbles of her; Gretta had a whole notebook of Nicole. They had a habit of forgetting to eat lunch. They remembered dinner most nights because they hit the bars too often and when Nicole was in her cups there was no stopping her from ordering wings and jumbo nachos because she could never pick just one. And they always slept together, Nicole on her belly with Gretta tucked into her side._

_No expectations, no demands. No labels. Just routine._

_They were good._

_And then there was the night Mercedes came home while Nicole was out on a bender and found Gretta out cold in the bathtub with a needle in her arm._

_Nicole remembers being maybe six drinks in at the only sports bar she could stomach when Mercedes rung her — seven times before she answered — to promise Nicole the ass-kicking of her life if this girl died in their bathroom._

_They weren’t so good, not after that._

_Gretta didn’t want help, not at first._

_She lashed out at Nicole for offering to help her get into treatment, screamed her throat raw and dissolved into sobs whenever she remembered the only person she thought could help her was already gone._

_She wanted to go back to the street, back to what she knew, where she was comfortable. Mercedes wanted to throw her out of the apartment, didn’t want it on her conscience if Gretta did reach the point of no return, but Nicole wouldn’t let her._

_“If she goes, I go.”_

_“Don’t be an idiot, Nicole. You have no place else to go.”_

_“She needs _help, _not hostility.”_

_“Your help isn’t good for shit if she isn’t ready to help herself.”_

_Mercedes had a point, but she had a soft spot for Nicole that won out in the end._

_It took four months of gentle assurance and so many promises that Nicole would be there for her every step of the way to get Gretta into treatment. Another month to convince her to go back when she bolted after two days._

_She’d been there eight weeks when the tables turned and it was time for Nicole to learn something._

_“I never told you how my sister died,” Gretta said over the phone one evening._

_“I figured you would when you were ready.”_

_They talked twice a week at that point, always after dinner on the days Gretta had grief counseling._

_“We were the same,” Gretta told her. “We fit the twin stereotype like that. We dressed the same when we were little, we were picky about the same foods. We like the same boys in high school, until I didn’t. And then we liked the same drugs. We thought it was special, using together. We couldn’t see how it was killing us, we were the same in that too. It took her just as easily as it could’ve taken me, Nicole.”_

_Gretta sounded different than when they first met. Gone was the wariness that left her sounding like doom was always a step behind her, there was nothing dark left to be afraid of. Not when she’d already faced the part she feared the most. Detox felt like a living death, that’s what she told Nicole, but she’d gotten through it. None of it would bring Mattie back but her sister would never forgive her if she let addiction take her too._

_“I thought detox was the scariest part of recovery,” Gretta went on. “And it was, in a way, because it came so close to breaking me. But I have to face the fact that my sister is never coming back and I still need to live. I have to learn how to live without my other half, and now without my vices. Which scares the shit out of me, but differently. To live is a gift I’m blessed to receive. The only thing left to be afraid of is choosing the right thing to do with it.”_

_Strong, Nicole realized, that’s how Gretta sounded._

_“I used to think admitting i needed help made me weak. I thought I should be able to do it all myself and I hated that I couldn’t. It’s always been hard for me not to be in control of all that’s going on around me, but it was the fear of being weak that was controlling me in the end. Asking for help is the braves thing a person can do, I see that now.”_

_And Nicole could kind of get that, the control thing. Okay, she could _really _get it because it read like a train of her own thoughts and maybe also scared the shit out of her._

_“I’m proud of you, you know,” Nicole told her. “For all that you’re doing for yourself. For all that you will.”_

_“You helped me get here,” Gretta said. “And I think I finally know what I want to do once I’m out of here and on my feet.”_

_“Oh yeah? What’s that?”_

_“I want to work in a treatment center, help people like me. The resident nurse here has been helping me look into it. What do you think about nursing school?”_

_“Gretta, that’s amazing.”_

_“I think you’d be good at something like that, too, Nicole. Helping people. You have the right heart for it.”_

_Three days later Nicole decided it was time to get a fucking job._

_She took to the streets, scoured for any help wanted signs she could find._

_Coasting was getting old, letting Mercedes pay for her meals and her dry cleaning and the roof over her head was getting even older. No matter how many times Mercedes insisted it was her parents’ money and there were boatloads of it and if she didn’t spend it herself her idiot siblings would it didn’t make Nicole feel any better._

_They’d grown close after graduation, skipping town and being roommates will do that to you, and another weight dropped hard on Nicole’s shoulders when she realized just how indebted to Mercedes she truly was, when she realized just how little she was contributing to society._

_Watching Gretta go through recovery was digging up dirt about her own life she’d been successfully avoiding for so long._

_She’d picked up an application at a pizza joint three blocks from the apartment when she saw the flyer. Tacked to a telephone pole it read, in big blue letters: TO SERVE AND PROTECT. Below, in smaller print: CONTRIBUTE TO THE SAFETY OF YOUR CITY. There was that word again, the one she couldn’t get out of her head. Contribute._

_Gretta would be proud of something like what the flyer boasted and that’s all Nicole needed to know to snag it and tuck it in her pocket._

_Mercedes actually laughed when Nicole showed her the flyer later at home._

_“Toronto Police College? You? A cop? Have we entered an alternate universe?”_

_“Shut up,” Nicole grumbled, snatching the flyer back. “I don’t know. Gretta said I’d be good at helping people. I guess it’s dumb.”_

_Mercedes drew out a sigh and leveled her gaze on Nicole, eyes narrowing. “Nicole,” Mercedes started after a moment, sarcasm gone from her tone. “If this is something you’re actually serious about, it’s not dumb. You have my support. And if you need help with tuition I can — ”_

_“God, Mercedes, no. That’s the whole point. I need to do something, I need to contribute something to this stupid society. You of all people know how little I actually do. Fuck knows how much money I owe you at this point.”_

_Nicole hadn’t explicitly said that out loud before that, definitely hadn’t admitted it to Mercedes, and it was the rebooting-a-frozen-computer kind of refreshing, like a cold shower after a day in the scalding heat._

_“Nicole,” Mercedes said again. “You don’t owe me shit. Friends help friends. Enroll in the academy, become a cop. Be a _good _cop. That’s all the repayment I need, you gorgeous idiot.”_

_So yeah._

_Nicole enrolled, reluctantly (kicking and screaming) let Mercedes foot the bill for tuition, and became a cop. Did her best to be a good one at first to appease her roommate, then to honor Gretta, but eventually because, well, it felt good. And she had a knack for it. Made her feel whole, serving the city, like she finally had a purpose, like every stupid wasteful thing she did in high school and the time since were slowly (finally) fading to black._

_Toronto started to feel less like a stop on the road and more like home._

_Stayed that way, too._

_For six fulfilling years._

_And then Randy Nedley called._

_Offered her five-thousand dollars more than Toronto was paying her to come be his Chief Deputy._

_For two fitful weeks she mulled it over before getting back on the phone with the old man to tell him, “All right, fine, I’ll come back to Purgatory.” Because, really, how was she supposed to say not to an extra five large when she’d spent the better part of the first six years of her career putting money aside to do something, anything, to repay the debt Mercedes still claimed she did not owe._

Nicole Haught was never supposed to come back to Purgatory.

She’d sworn it up and down this town would stay in her rearview mirror.

Yet here she is, fresh off her first shift in khaki and blue, staring at the empty fridge in her tiny studio rental on Purgatory’s main drag. Her stomach growls something fierce and she gives it a weary look.

“Great,” she says aloud to the empty apartment.

Ten minutes later she pulls into the local grocery store lot and abandons ship.

The place hasn’t changed a bit since Nicole was a kid: same faded blue sign over the double doors, same barn lighting throughout the aisles, same dingy atmosphere that manages to at once feel like a food court in a mall and a hospital waiting room. She snags a cart and takes to the aisles.

Cereal first. Raisin Bran and Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Milk.

Eggs.

Orange juice.

Coffee beans.

Bacon.

A ribeye.

Rack of lamb.

Garlic.

Potatoes, Yukon Golds and Russets.

Cauliflower.

Carrots.

And — 

a child?

“Are you a cop?” the kid asks, tugging at her sleeve, and Nicole realizes she forgot to change out of uniform before heading out again.

“Sure am, kid,” she replies, gives a nod. “Is there somethin’ I can do for ya?”

She looks around for any nearby adult, comes up empty, and offers the young girl the comforting smile she saves for interactions with kiddos on the job.

“Cops help people, and I can’t find my mom, and I wasn’t s’posed to leave her side.” The kid drops her voice to a whisper, eyes going wide, then, “. . . But I_ did.”_

For a moment Nicole isn’t sure if she should go on and help or if she should take the kid to the customer service counter and have them run a loudspeaker announcement.

The girl looks up at her with big hopeful blue eyes and a pout that sparks something in Nicole’s repressed memory that would take far too much manpower to dig up right then. The kid is maybe eight, but Nicole’s never been good at guessing with the little ones, and she’s in blue jeans and cowboy boots with a faded Tears For Fears tee that looks like it’s been cut down with scissors from an adult’s size and suddenly Nicole is dying to know who’s raising this one.

“All right,” Nicole tells hers with a nod, playfully serious. “I like your shirt, so I’ll help.”

“Mama says their music was on the radio when I was bein’ made,” the girl tells her with pride, pointing at her shirt, and Nicole just barely catches herself before she snorts.

“Come on,” Nicole says with a soft laugh, offers her hand in case the kid decides to lave _her _side next. “Let’s go find your mom.”

They’re strolling past cases of frozen pizzas and microwave meals, bags of freezer fries, hand in hand, when Nicole remembers to introduce herself. “Name’s Officer Nicole Haught, by the way, kid. At your service.”

“I’m Alice,” comes the cheerful reply. “Is it fun being a cop?”

Quite a loaded question from such a small human, Nicole thinks. Fulfilling, definitely. Occasionally stressful, tedious when it’s time for paperwork, dangerous from time to time — but fun? She’s never thought about it like that. It’s always been duty first. But it was sure as hell fun christening her first patrol shift with Nedley over a mug of whiskey at nine that morning, she’ll admit that much.

“It can be fun sometimes,” Nicole allows with a shrug. “I have to be careful, though. I’m here to protect people like you, after all.”

“Mama says I can’t have a gun until I’m at _least _ten,” Alice tells her like it’s the most ludicrous thing to have ever been said. “You get one _all _the time.”

And Nicole’s about to open her mouth to tell the kid she might need to have a word with this mother of hers when a voice calls out behind them — _“Alice Michelle! What did I tell you about runnin’ off like that? Get your butt over here.” _— and Nicole’s blood runs cold because while she’s never heard it sound so stern she could still, after all these years, pick that voice out of a crowd.

In the moment she’s grateful for the uniform; her tattoos are under wraps and the Stetson hides most of her hair, the two dead giveaways.

Nicole doesn’t turn around until Alice drags her by the hand, doesn’t look up from beneath the brim of her hat until the woman’s come close enough that it would be rude not to.

Standing before her, for the first time in eight years, for the first time since that afternoon behind the Blue Devils’ gymnasium, is Waverly Earp.

Waverly Earp, who’s looking at her like her brain just short-circuited something biblical.

Who’s aged like fine wine since high school, by the way, all sun-kissed and toned, finally carrying her weight like there isn’t something eating at her mind at any given second. Nicole could get used to a sight like that, however much she’d also like to never come face to face with her again.

It’s all she can do to stare back, tight-lipped smile on her face, doing her damn best not to give anything away for the sake of the kid.

The kid, Alice, who’s noticed none of the tension, because she’s tugging on Nicole’s hand and rushing her words out excitedly: “I made a cop friend, Mama. She has a gun.”

Which, yes, is all technically true.

Nicole’s never been the best with kids, no, but she reasons this one isn’t so bad. This one she wouldn’t mind crossing paths with again.

But Waverly?

Waverly’s still staring back at her with something like fire in her eyes, something like anger that’s forcing the corner of her mouth to twitch. Something that sits alongside something else that isn’t so much fiery as it is sad.

“This is your mom, huh?” Nicole asks Alice, rhetorically, because it’s all she can do to lay an air of innocence over the whole thing. Probably doesn’t help that a smirk finds its way onto her lips when she finally catches Waverly’s eye. Salt in the wound. Don’t do that.

“We’ve got to go,” Waverly says quickly, dropping her gaze, grabbing for Alice’s hand, and a wedding ring catches the light and Nicole’s eye. “Say thank you to the officer.”

And Alice does, sweet kid that she is. Shouts a thank you and a “see ya ‘round, Officer Nicole!” over her shoulder while her mother drags her to the checkout lanes.

Her _mother._

Waverly.

Who Nicole hasn’t thought about for ages, honestly, because she’s spent the last eight years of her life trying to put the town she grew up behind her.

So she’s here why?

Nicole doesn’t know what she’s going to do about it, if she should do anything at all. She saw the way Waverly looked at her, eyes full of surprise first and anger second and all the while brimming with an innocent kind of hurt Nicole never wants to see again. Makes her think of dejected puppies.

That her fondest memories of high school all hail from her senior year could have everything or nothing to do with Waverly Earp.

They had a good run, all things considered. Nicole could have been nicer in the end, sure, but she remembers being scared of control slipping through her fingers when it was the only thing she wanted to hold on to. Back then she dreaded any lack of control, felt weak without it, and weakness was not an option her pride was yet ready to handle.

But that was then. That was before she spent two years testing her limits in dive bars and getting absolutely nowhere. 

That was before Gretta.

Who would tell her to do what in this situation?

She’d tell Nicole to open a dialogue with Waverly, she’d tell her to air out the closet of their relationship, for both of their sakes. Gretta’s still big on redemption, recovery, and reconciliation. It’s both the most admirable and most annoying quality she has.

Nicole can’t stop coming back to the very important developments that are Waverly’s married and Waverly’s got a kid. A cute kid with a big mouth in the best way and hair like a mare with a Hollywood stylist. And blue eyes? Which, yes, is genetically possible if Waverly carries the gene for it. Whatever way — the thought of Waverly in bed with some local asshole turns her stomach and she really shouldn’t care but it looms like thunderclouds and Nicole’s always itching to chase a storm.

Whatever.

Shake it off. 

Nicole hightails it out of the grocery store and makes for the new place she calls home. The god-awfully tiny studio apartment she wouldn’t have taken if it weren’t three-hundred-and-eighty-dollars a month kind of dirt cheap.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, Waverly Earp is not going to lose her marbles in front of her daughter. Not when she has to get the both of them home in one piece.

Focus, she needs to focus, but it ain’t so easy with her heart hammering in her chest and blind desperation threatening to cloud her vision.

She takes the drives back to the homestead slow, slow enough for Alice to ask her if it’s legal to drive _under _the speed limit, but they make it home okay.

“Go feed the chickens and I’ll fix you a snack,” Waverly tells Alice as they’re getting out of the Jeep.

Yeah, they keep chickens on the homestead now. Alice’s idea.

Waverly’s taking station in the kitchen when Rosita sidles up to her and gives her a loving little pat on the bottom.

“Hey, babe.”

“She’s back,” Waverly sighs out in lieu of a greeting because she’s not going to have a clear head until it’s out of the bag.

“Who’s — ” but Waverly rounds on her with exasperation in her eyes and all Rosita can say is “ — oh,” because she gets it now. “Shit.”

“That’s not even the best part,” Waverly says with biting sarcasm that feels a tiny bit fake. “Alice likes her. And she’s a _cop _now.”

“Shit,” Rosita says again.

“I’m going to kill Nedley.”

“I’ll open a bottle of Stoli.”

Across town Nicole manages not to think about Waverly for three days. Three long days during which she realizes Nedley is paying her more than Toronto ever would to do a whole lot less than Toronto ever needed her to do. Two old complexes crop up in those three days that she tells Mercedes would be perfect to flip into condos. Three days that at their close feel all too short because come the fourth she’s no longer able to keep intrusive thoughts from getting in the way of her levelheadedness.

Thoughts like what idiot got lucky enough to marry Waverly Earp and father that kickass kid? Assuming there is a father and not just a sperm donor. Thoughts like why do you suddenly care who she’s married to when eight years ago you made it perfectly clear you wanted nothing more to do with her? Ones like have you finally processed how much of an asshole you were in high school? That one she knows she has, she knows she’s grown. The Nicole Haught that grew up in Purgatory is worlds different than the Nicole Haught that came back.

The fifth day is her first off since the return and she doesn’t know what to do with the extra time. All two of her friends are still in Toronto and the folks who still know her in town either employ her or aren’t too sweet on her anymore.

Booze it is.

Nicole walks the short block and a half to Shorty’s at happy hour and parks herself at the bar. Seems she’s the only one not paired off, only one without someone to call friend. Only one drinking alone. Seems fitting.

When the bartender finally rounds on her Nicole faintly recognizes her face from the halls of Purgatory High and maybe from a junior biology class, too. The woman doesn’t say anything, just looks at her with her brows raised and an impatient twitch in her tight smile.

“Pint of whatever’s on tap?” Nicole asks, squaring her jaw.

The woman looks at her like she was expecting something else, anything else, to come out of Nicole’s mouth, like she’s disappointed with what actually did. But she goes to serve Nicole just the same, dropping a frosty mug onto the bar hard enough that some of the lager sloshes over the rim.

Nicole’s about to reach for the thing when the woman pulls it back across the bar and levels her with a cold look, the sourest scowl Nicole thinks she’s ever seen.

“You got a lot of nerve showing your face here, Haught.”

And she’s about to ask the woman what in god’s name she’s talking about when some local calls _“Rosita!” _from the other end of the bar and the woman, Rosita apparently, throws an index finger up to stave him off without taking her eyes off Nicole. 

“The only reason I haven’t kicked your ass to the curb is that throwing a cop out of the bar would be bad for business,” Rosita tells her with a sickly sweet smile. “You’re lucky this town loves their boys in blue.”

“I’m sorry,” Nicole starts, trying to keep her jaw off the floor. “If I’ve done something to offend you I would love nothing more than to make it right.”

“What you’re going to do is have your drink.” Rosita pushes the pint into Nicole’s hands and leans over the bar, their faces inches apart, and lowers her tone to a steady rumble. “Then you’re going to leave. After that you’re going to stay away from my bar, you’re going to forget you ever met my kid, and you’re going to stay the _hell _away from my wife.”

Oh, Nicole thinks.

Shit.

“Nicole came into the bar today,” Rosita tells Waverly over a glass of wine later that night once Alice is finally down.

“What did she want?” Waverly asks, taking the bait with a sip of merlot.

“A drink,” Rosita scoffs. “Can you believe her?”

“’Sita she hasn’t been back to Purgatory in eight years. I doubt she knows we own the bar. Or that we’re. . . y’know.”

“You’re defending her.”

To Waverly it feels like too much of an accusation, too lame an attack, and she doesn’t quite know what to think. Of Rosita and her rage, of herself for okay, _fine, _defending Nicole after all these years. It shouldn’t feel right to defend someone who hurt her in the cruelest fashion, but it feels okay to defend someone she never fully stopped loving because she never got anything close to closure.

“I’m sorry,” Waverly whispers, looks down at the glass of wine in her hands, shakes her head. “I don’t know why I do that.”

Rosita reaches across the table to lay a hand on Waverly’s arm. “No, baby, _I’m _sorry,” she says softly, like Waverly might crack and shatter if she’s any louder. “Old wounds. I get it.”

Still called an old wound if it never closed?

It’s a lot more than that, really, more like an open grave that’s been waiting on her eight years now. Whether to jump in and get buried or fill the thing with dirt and run is the next decision she needs to make. It’s not something she can ignore any longer, not with Nicole back in town. And maybe it’s not a decision she should be humoring in the first place when she’s got both a wife and a child in the picture.

Though the child will always be more important than the wife, Waverly knows, because she and Rosita aren’t just raising Alice for themselves.

There will always be Wynonna.

If she ever comes back home.

If she ever comes to take responsibility.

At this point Waverly doesn’t think she wants her to anymore. Not now that she and Rosita are the only parents Alice has ever known.

When the kid was born Wynonna never asked Waverly to do anything other than make sure she wound up in a good home. Then Wynonna split with Doc hot on her heels. And Waverly, freshly eighteen, was stuck with a baby.

No.

Not stuck.

Keeping Alice was her choice. An Earp should be raised by an Earp, that’s how she felt. Their blood was special, that much she’d always known. No way in hell was Waverly ever going to let anybody else raise that baby.

So she stayed in Purgatory. Stayed with the kid. Stayed with the woman who helped her through her pain after Nicole.

Maybe the kid will always be more important than the wife because Rosita’s also never completely had Waverly. Not when their relationship was built on the crumbling foundation Nicole left behind.

It takes a minute for her to realize Rosita’s talking to her again, that she’s pulled their chairs in close enough for her to slip an arm around Waverly’s shoulders and lean in to kiss her temple.

“I won’t let her hurt you again, Waves,” Rosita’s mumbling into her ear. “Don’t worry.”

But Waverly isn’t worried, no, she’s built emotional walls since high school, but she still wants answers. She’s always wanted those.

So she waits.

Three days she waits until Rosita’s finally moved on to other things, until two am one night when Rosita’s finally asleep and snoring those cute little rumbles of thunder Waverly’s so fond of.

And then she texts Nicole because, yeah, even after eight years she’s never been able to lose that number.

At the station Nicole’s on the graveyard shift when her phone chimes with a text. She doesn’t have the number saved anymore but she doesn’t need to. Nicole still knows it by heart. 

**[2:07am] UNKNOWN: **Is this still you?

She stares at it for a minute before giving in. Do the right thing, dummy, Gretta says in her head. 

**[2:09am] NICOLE: **Still me.

It takes Waverly ten minutes to reply and Nicole spends every grueling second trying not to wonder what Waverly could possibly want from her after all this time at this hour of the morning. And, okay, maybe she saves her number again.

**[2:19am] WAVERLY: **I want to talk. Can you come by the bar tomorrow?

**[2:20am] NICOLE: **You should know I’ve been warned to stay away from both you and the bar.

**[2:21am] WAVERLY: **Doesn’t be an idiot. Rosita’s taking the night off.

Nicole sighs.

She really shouldn’t and she knows it. She also knows how much she’s grown since high school, how much her emotional maturity has bettered since she skipped town. Now that she’s back she knows it would be worse to ignore the past because in Purgatory your past always on your heels until you prove yourself changed and sometimes not even then does it let up. So she has to and she knows that too but she doesn’t know exactly how she feels about it.

**[2:23am] NICOLE: **Okay. My shift ends at eight.

It was too easy to put high school out of her mind in Toronto where everything was new and alive and begging to be explored. Toronto let Nicole play with fire and hedonism, ice and intoxication. Toronto gave her Gretta. And in turn Gretta gave her a sense of purpose, taught her how to play her weaknesses into strengths and find the path she was born to take.

The badge gave her power but the job taught her control was never truly hers until she worked _with _her team _for _the people instead of alone and against them, instead of demanding control outright just because she wore the shield. 

Toronto did right by Nicole in the end.

Maybe it’s time she does right by Waverly.

Next evening Nicole goes to Shorty’s in uniform just in case she needs a plausible excuse to be there.

It’s a calm crowd when she strolls in, mostly old timers, and a trio of men in leather vests at the pool table.

Nicole squares her shoulders, sets her jaw, and takes a stool, setting her Stetson on the bar. On top of the uniform she still wears her cop face, the lawful neutral look that remains approachable while not yet giving anything away. Until she knows exactly where this is going Nicole won’t show her hand.

Which is what?

Not even Nicole knows the answer to that yet.

All she knows is she’s here and she’s not going anywhere because to bail at this point would be nothing but cowardly and Nicole won’t ever let that word describe her again.

It’s five minutes sitting at the bar before Waverly gets to her. Waverly, who’s in jeans and a sleeveless blue blouse with her hair down around her shoulders in waves and Nicole really isn’t okay with the way something squeezes in her chest as soon as she lays eyes on her for the second time since she came home. That’s not supposed to happen.

They lock eyes as Waverly strides behind the bar and Nicole’s thrown back eight years in a millisecond with a blow to the chest that knocks the wind out of her and suddenly she’s eighteen again and Waverly’s looking at her like she’s the sun in the sky and Nicole feels a grin she hasn’t worn in years pull its way across her lips and everything is easy again.

Easy because Waverly’s pulling a can of Blue Ribbon from the cooler beneath the bar and sauntering over to her with something like hope in her eyes and Nicole’s forgotten how much she has to be ashamed of in this moment because they’ve done this dance a thousand times over.

Waverly cracks the can and sets it in front of Nicole.

“Alice won’t shut up about you,” Waverly says softly, almost shy. “Officer Nicole this, Officer Nicole that. It’s driving Rosita absolutely mad.”

“She’s a good kid,” Nicole says simply. “You and your wife are very lucky.”

“We are. Yeah.”

Nicole palms the beer can, sips idly, says, “You wanted to talk.”

“You came back,” Waverly says. “Why?”

For Nedley, Nicole thinks, who’s turning out to be the best boss she’s ever had. For the money. For Mercedes, who’s only ever wanted her to succeed. For Gretta, who’s told her time and again she won’t be her whole self until she lets the past back in.

For herself, she supposes, because Gretta is rarely ever wrong about those things.

Ripping off a bandaid and opening a can of worms at the same time shouldn’t make too big a mess, right?

“I had to,” Nicole decides aloud. “I liked Toronto, but my history is here.”

“Not good enough,” Waverly tells her. “Why’d you come back?” It’s the tone that makes it a leading question. The same tone she used to use when Nicole wanted to watch Oz reruns but Waverly had episodes of Grey’s to catch up on. They never got to Oz, but Nicole’s more of a Golden Girls gal these days.

Nicole sighs. She thinks she knows what Waverly wants her to say, but she won’t. Can’t. She doesn’t even know if there’s any truth to it herself.

“When I was in Toronto I had a. . . friend,” Nicole starts, delicately, and tries to ignore the way Waverly frowns at the term. “She overdosed in my apartment a few months after her sister died. I helped her get into treatment and once it stuck she helped me realize that who I was then and who I was born to be would never piece together if I didn’t put in the emotional work.” And it feels weird talking about this with someone other than Gretta, Nicole hasn’t done that until now, but it also feels easy because she knows the look Waverly’s giving her. The look that says she’s listening and she cares and she wants to know what Nicole has to say. “I didn’t want to do it, you know? I didn’t want to admit I’d ever done anything wrong, I didn’t want to face my flaws and work them into strengths like she was doing. Watching her go through recovery, it. . . I don’t know, it made me feel like — shit, if she could do something so brave for herself and I couldn’t even admit I was an emotionally unavailable asshole with control issues, then what else did it make me? So I did it. I put in the work because she was right, and I was ready to become the person I was born to be. No more cowering from my flaws, couldn’t be a coward any longer.”

They’re both quiet after that for the longest moment Nicole think she’s ever sat through because she rushed all of that out and she’s trying to catch her breath and the room’s spinning around her. It’s hard not to fidget in her seat while Waverly just looks at her, and looks hard, like she’s finally found treasure after a lifetime of hunting. Nicole fixates on the beer in her hands because meeting that look is too much to bear and she has no idea what Waverly would find in her own face if she braved it.

“Nicole,” Waverly says gently, then again, “Why did you come back?”

She drinks before she dares to speak, drinks again, letting the beer cool her tongue and calm her nerves.

Now she’s certain she knows what Waverly wants her to say and it’s even harder now because when she really thinks about it what Waverly wants her to say is truer than she’d like it to be.

“I came back for you.” Nicole forces the words from her mouth even when they taste like dirt in her throat and she almost chokes before she gets them out. “And I don’t think I realized that until right now, and it’s a lot to wrap my head around, but I know it’s true.” When she looks at Waverly she can tell exactly what reads on her own face because Waverly’s eyes are soft like how they used to get when Nicole really needed a nap but really didn’t want to sleep and she finally realizes just how tired holding all of this in has made her. “I came back because what I did to you is the last thing I need to rectify if I ever want to feel like I can breathe again.”

She watches Waverly think about it the same way she used to watch her think about where to order takeout from, with patience and a dash of awe because even when Waverly Earp is in her own head she is still a vision.

Dangerous sentiment you got there.

Nicole feels like bolting. From the bar, from Waverly, from Purgatory all over again because none of what her body is doing is good.

Not the elevated thrum of her heart, not the warmth in her bones. Not the softness she feels invading her eyes, not the hopeful smile she’s so desperately trying to bite back.

Definitely not the glow that’s starting to emerge around Waverly.

It’s all bad.

None of it is supposed to be happening and she has no idea why any of it is and she maybe doesn’t want to know anyway.

Waverly pulls her from her thoughts with a hand on her forearm that only lingers for a millisecond before it’s gone.

“If the same Nicole Haught that left was the one who came back I’d never in a million years tell you what I’m about to say. So listen, okay?”

Nicole nods, numb.

“I forgave you a long time ago.” It’s a sad smile Waverly wears now. “I think you should do the same.”

It takes Nicole five days to realize what her body was doing to her in the bar that night with Waverly, another four to come to terms with it.

It’s not good.

Or it’s fine, but it’s terrifying, and Nicole is not used to being so scared.

Learning from Gretta while she went through recovery taught Nicole more than she was ever prepared to learn, but she’s okay with that now. She’s okay with every emotional milestone she’s reached thus far because each one she was able to see waiting on the horizon. They were specific and they made sense to Nicole and reaching them was her goal. This one came at her out of left field and ripped her world a new one because until the night in the bar this one did not exist. She’d managed to expel it entirely from her mind even when she was an active participant. Somehow.

But she knows now.

She’d lied to Waverly behind the gym that day and it only took eight years for her to realize it.

_I’ll never love you._

Never is a big word, lasts a long time.

Also meant nothing when she said it back then, she knows that now. She grilled herself for five days to pull it from the part of her mind she was never supposed to have access to and it hit her like a ton of bricks because it shouldn’t be possible to spend so much time with someone, to be so intimate, to let them into your own private world, and not realize how much you love them.

Everything she should have felt for Waverly in high school rushed her in droves that night at the bar, charged her like a pack of wildebeests. It took her a bit, but she named every feeling.

There was admiration for Waverly as she was now, driven and strong and kind to people who didn’t always deserve it. For Waverly as she was then, loving and attentive and more vulnerable with her emotions than the old Nicole ever deserved.

There was longing. To do right by Waverly now, to prove herself changed, to prove she cares. Because she does, even if she didn’t know it when it mattered most.

There was need. To know the woman Waverly has grown into, to know what makes her world turn.

Next came desire. Mostly to protect, to safeguard Waverly’s vulnerability and whatever innocence she has left. There’s a thing Nicole does, a guard-dog thing, when it comes to the feelings of those she cares about. To protect and preserve, that’s how she tags it, her own little twist on the Toronto police motto.

Then there’s the other side of desire, the side Nicole won’t let herself think about.

Being flooded with the love you felt for someone so long ago but were unable to feel until now is a lot all at once and Nicole isn’t sure how to process it without falling down a rabbit hole she shouldn’t even be nearing the edge of.

Nicole kind of hates herself for this one.

For taking eight years when they could have been gold if only her brain had let her _feel._

For wanting to chase this new forbidden yearning, for wanting to put herself back into Waverly’s life when that’s the last thing either of them need right now. 

Three weeks later dispatch sends her out to the Earp homestead with report of home invasion.

It’s ten past eleven when Nicole pulls her cruiser up to the house and finds Waverly and Alice huddled under a blanket on the porch steps.

“Everyone all right?” Nicole asks on her approach.

Upon closer inspection she sees Alice is fast asleep against Waverly’s shoulder and a faint smile makes its way across her lips. Cute kid.

Waverly nods slowly, like she’s unsure of the answer. “I didn’t. . .” She looks over her shoulder at the front door, then back at Nicole. “I didn’t want to be — ”

“Alone in the house?” Nicole finishes for her. “I know.”

“Yeah,” Waverly says softly, eyes downcast as she allows a smile. “Exactly.”

The next words out of Nicole’s mouth feel different now that she knows what her emotions are doing to her.

“I’m here now. Do you want to go inside?”

After Alice is tucked back into bed they rally at the kitchen table where Waverly pours herself a glass of wine and Nicole flips open her notebook.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

Waverly and Alice were asleep when Waverly awoke to scuffling sounds coming from Wynonna’s old room — they use it for storage now. Waverly got up to investigate but before she could make it out of her room a hooded man in dark clothing sprinted past her clutching what looked like a backpack.

“Was anything taken from the house?” Nicole asks, tapping pen against paper.

Waverly nods, sips her wine, tells Nicole, “Some of Wynonna’s old jewelry and one of Daddy’s handguns.”

Because she’s a cop and she needs all the facts to file a report and not because she cares at all to know for herself (nope, not a bit), she has to ask:

“And where’s, um — where’s the wife?”

Waverly waves weakly over her shoulder, toward the door. “She’s at a conference in Winnipeg to give a talk about DNA replication and gene regulation.”

Impressive, Nicole thinks.

“Is there anything else I can do for you tonight, Waverly?” she asks instead.

“Could you. . .” Waverly’s looking at her hands, tugging at her thumb, letting her words fall so delicately it’s almost like she’s unsure she’s allowed to say them. “Could you stay?”

“Me?” Nicole asks, like she isn’t the only other person in the room. Follows it up with, “Like sit out in my cruiser and watch the house? Make sure nothing else happens?” like she isn’t the most useless lesbian there ever was.

Waverly tilts her head and smiles fondly (okay, both happily un- and impressed) at her like she used to do when Nicole would peel off her shirt and flex in the mirror to watch how her tattoos rippled over her muscles. The Nicole that came back isn’t so vain, but she still loves that smile.

“I want you in the house,” Waverly tells her shyly, hopefully. “If it isn’t too much to ask.”

It isn’t. Even if it was, Nicole would do it anyway.

She would do a lot of things for Waverly Earp.

So Nicole radios it in that she’s posting herself at the Earp homestead for the duration of her shift at the request of the homeowner.

An hour later they’re on opposite ends of the couch with some mindless sitcom rerun humming quietly on the television. Waverly’s drinking chardonnay straight from the bottle and Nicole’s itching for the last twenty minutes of her shift to fly by so she can pour herself a drink.

They don’t talk, just sit, both only half distracted by the television.

It was this same couch they’d sat on all those years ago the night Wynonna went missing, this same couch Waverly tucked herself into Nicole on when she’d been alone and scared and needed the comfort and safety of Nicole’s arms around her.

This feels eerily similar and worlds different all at once.

Now that Nicole’s facing everything she was incapable of feeling in high school she wishes she could reach out, could offer Waverly her hand, or solace in her arms, anything that would tell her Nicole would be there as long as she wanted. Whenever she wanted. Wherever. Under any circumstance. 

When Nicole’s shift ends at one she excuses herself and makes for the kitchen. Fetches a bottle of whiskey from where the Earps have always kept it atop the fridge, snags a cup, and heads back. Either time of night or stress of emotion is picking at her brain because when she drops down onto the couch she swears Waverly’s closer to her than she was before.

“Starting a little late, aren’t we?” Waverly asks, lifts her chin toward the drink in Nicole’s hand.

“I was on the clock,” Nicole says sheepishly. “And I only drink on the clock with Nedley.”

“Is the sheriff a bad influence on his deputies? Is that what I’m hearing?”

Nicole hums and knocks back her first two fingers of whiskey. “Not a chance,” she tells Waverly with a proud grin. “Best boss I’ve ever had.” And she wants to add something about she’s glad she took him up on his offer to come back to Purgatory but she doesn’t want to push anything and Waverly already knows why she really came back. Probably wouldn’t be appropriate to say she’s glad she came back because spending time with Waverly as the Nicole she is now is the greatest thing since sliced bread and she can’t get enough of it. Yeah, she definitely can’t say that. Especially not when Waverly’s married with a child and owes Nicole nothing.

“Are you glad you came back?” Waverly asks like she’s right there in Nicole’s head. Ain’t hard to tell by the color in her cheeks that she’s feeling that wine.

Better get on her level, Nicole thinks, and pours herself a second drink. It goes down smooth.

“I mean. . .” How is she supposed to answer that? And what is Waverly playing at? The truth is the easiest answer, Gretta says in the back of her head. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. I didn’t think I would be, but I am. It’s nice.”

She can feel Waverly stealing little looks at her in-between stints of pretending to pay attention to the television and it makes Nicole’s skin crawl. In a good way, which she didn’t even know was a thing until now. First time for everything. 

Nicole’s third whiskey might as well be apple juice with how easy it goes down and drinking more right now, in this company, is either a really good or a really bad idea. Nicole can’t tell which it is.

“What about me?” Waverly isn’t looking at her anymore, speaks so quietly Nicole would’ve missed it if she weren’t so focused on her. “Were you happy to see me?”

She wasn’t, and then she was. It only took getting hit with everything she never felt in high school. 

This time she drinks straight from the bottle. Drinks and thumbs open the buttons on her sleeves to push them up to her elbows because her skin’s already gone warm.

“I wasn’t,” Nicole says truthfully and hates how quick Waverly is to look hurt. “And then I was. I realized a whole lot after we talked at the bar. I still don’t understand why you don’t hate me. But — ” she shakes her head. “ — yeah. I like seeing you.”

“You have more tattoos than you left with,” Waverly says, effectively killing the conversation. Nicole’s grateful for it.

“I do.”

“Can I see?”

Nicole nods, offers Waverly her arm. 

This time she drinks to calm her heart when Waverly sidles up to her and takes her forearm in gentle hands, fingertips like scorch marks on her skin. Nicole watches, transfixed, as fingertips coast over the shaded ocean waves that fill the space around chain links and vine. She swears she can feel Waverly’s touch in her bones and it’s at once the safest and most hazardous touch she’s ever felt.

Waverly turns her arm over and finds the bale of sea turtles swimming up toward her elbow. There are three of them, all in various states of age, brought to life in black and white with heavy shadows and bold outlines and Waverly takes her sweet time tracing along each one of their shells.

“I like these,” she says softly, keeps her hold on Nicole’s arm. “What do they mean to you?”

“When I was in the academy I had to learn to be patient with myself. Was the first time I was willingly on someone else’s schedule,” Nicole starts in, a smile tugging at her lips as she finally begins to relax a little bit. Everything on her body means something special to her, has strings tied to her heart, and talking about them never fails to put her at ease. “I knew I wanted to see it through, but wasn’t sure if I could. I still wasn’t any good at finishing things. I got scared I wasn’t going to graduate, so I pushed through to prove myself wrong. Not every day was easy, or even good, but I did it. And the sea turtle’s known to symbolize patience with how long they live, so I stuck a few on me. Patience and endurance, that’s what they mean to me.”

“I’ve always loved this one,” Waverly says next, running her fingers along the thick chain intertwined with vines from where it begins at the shackle around Nicole’s wrist up to where it disappears beneath her sleeve. “You never told me what it meant.”

Because it didn’t mean anything then.

It takes a moment for Nicole to fin an answer, a moment for her to reach from what it meant when she got it (dunno, looked cool)to what it means now.

“I’ll always be shackled to something, no matter where I am in life,” Nicole decides, letting nostalgia hit her head on. It took three months to find a shop willing to tattoo a sixteen-year-old, even with parental consent, but only about five minutes to convince her parents to sign the consent form. “But there’s always room to grow.”

Definitely didn’t mean that when she got it, no, nothing even close, she was nowhere near that insightful at sixteen. It didn’t take on its meaning until after Gretta, she supposes, when they were both learning to grow.

There’s a lot to say for the ink Nicole’s taken on, a lot to go on and a lot to go forth with, and Waverly’s smiling at her like this is the most important exploration to ever come across the desk of mankind, so Nicole won’t put a stop to it. Not when she — what?

She knows she loved Waverly in high school. But now? It sure feels a lot like love, sure feels real, but Nicole isn’t sure if it is. She loved Waverly as she was then, knows that now, but she doesn’t know the Waverly who sits beside her.

But hell, she wants to.

Wants to know what songs she sings under her breath while she gets ready in the morning. Wants to know what books she reads before bed, what movies she watches at the end of a long day when she needs to ease her mind. What brand of toothpaste she uses. If she still likes her tea with two sugar cubes and a teaspoon of almond milk. If she still has peach schnapps and travel checkers in her go-bag.

Nicole wants to know it all.

And never in a million years did she think she would be going down this road with a married woman, let alone a married Waverly Earp, but here she is. Ready to dive in head first. Fits the lesbian stereotype.

“What’s this one?” Waverly pulls Nicole out of her thoughts with a hand on her right arm where a series of Roman numerals run around Nicole’s forearm like a cuff. “It looks new.”

“Got it done right before I left Toronto. It’s my old badge number.”

Waverly hums her approval and moves on to the little American traditional dagger on Nicole’s finger, tugs gently on the thumb like she used to do when she was in the redhead’s arms and it makes Nicole’s heart jump in her chest. She’d give her that space again in a heartbeat if Waverly asked.

She doesn’t wait for a question about this one, just tells her, “That one’s just a reminder to soldier on, to stay strong.”

“You’ve always been strong,” Waverly says with a nod, flashing a dopey smile. “But this is the strongest I’ve ever seen you. It’s a good look.”

Which okay, yeah, feels great to hear, but it shouldn’t mean as much as it does. Nicole doesn’t think she deserves that. So she drinks, shrugs, and tugs at her collar.

And she can hear her heart thundering in her ears, can feel Waverly’s hands on her arm in every last one of her nerves. Kind of feels like flames licking at her skin, like getting a little too close to a campfire.

It’s somewhere between a comforting warmth and a damning heat.

“Waverly,” Nicole warns halfheartedly while she watches Waverly run her fingertips over her knuckles, over the lotus flower on Nicole’s middle finger. Waverly’s always liked Nicole’s hands, always used to mess with her fingers when she tucked into her arms because it made her feel that much more secure. Nicole hasn’t felt that touch in years and yet it feels like the last one came just yesterday. “You shouldn’t — ”

“Is that it?”

“What?”

“Your tattoos. Is that it?”

“No, I’ve got — ”

“Show me.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

Because they’re under wraps, because she’d have to shed layers to show them, because she’s far too ready to do just that. Not a good idea. Too many moving pieces in this whole thing. Too much at risk, too much to gain. Too much could go wrong and so much could go right.

And then Waverly says, “I said show me,” and there’s only one way this can actually go.

It’s not just the booze, not just the guilt that makes Nicole feel like she owes Waverly anything she asks for. It’s the part of her that wants this, wants to show her, wants to lay her cards face up for Waverly to read.

So she does.

So she sets her whiskey on the coffee table and starts thumbing open the buttons on her uniform top until there aren’t any more and the thing falls open over her white tank top undershirt and she lays it aside.

First there’s the black handprint on the back of her shoulder (“Whose print is this?” “Mercedes.” “You have _Mercedes Gardner’s _handprint on your shoulder?” “You hush. She had my back when it mattered most.” "Look at you, all sentimental. Who are you and what have you done with Nicole Haught?" "Shut up."), then there’s the little diamond front and center at the base of her throat (“Since when are you into bling?” “Since Google told me diamonds are believed to fill negative spaces in oneself with the purity of love.” “You sure that wasn’t Pinterest?” “Shut up.” “But you like when I talk.” “Maybe.”), and just below that:

The antlers on her chest that spread like wings over her collarbones with tips that stretch nearly to her shoulders. (“These — they’re beautiful. What do they mean?”) Spiritual authority, that’s what those mean. Taking charge of your faith, turning it into something you can fight for, something that drives you to be who you were put on this earth to be, that’s what those mean.

Until Waverly lays her lips over one of their branches, coasts her arms down Nicole’s biceps, takes pale skin between her teeth and tugs, that’s what those mean.

After that they mean power.

Power to chase what you desire, whatever you believe is your destiny.

And Nicole’s thought a lot about destiny in the eight years she’s been gone, but not until now has she thought about what she would go back and change if she could. She would’ve told Waverly she loved her if she’d known it herself, would have made damn sure Waverly never felt anything less than angelic after that, would have made sure Waverly knew this world was built for her to play with, to explore, to find her throne, to reign over.

“Waverly,” Nicole warns again when her mouth finds the juncture between throat and jaw. Getting harder and harder for Nicole to remember how to breathe, how to remember that they aren’t in high school any longer, that if they’re going to play this game right now there are consequences she isn’t ready to be responsible for. “We can’t.”

It’s a lot.

Really.

Almost too much.

Feels like the weight of the world lowering slow onto Nicole’s chest, tacking her down, trapping her beneath its burden and forcing air from her lungs and leaving no room to refill.

She doesn’t know how to stop it.

Only knows how to lay her hands low on Waverly’s waist, how to pull her that much closer, closer than she should ever be, but it feels right. Pulling Waverly onto her lap and into her arms and back into her world feels a lot like coming home.

“Come here,” Nicole whispers as her hands find Waverly’s face, lifting her chin so their lips can meet somewhere in the middle.

They manage to make it upstairs without taking their hands off of each other.

This time around Nicole doesn’t want Waverly’s hands anywhere other than in her hair when she descends on her, and then she wants them everywhere.

“Can I ask you something you probably don’t want to answer?” Waverly mumbles against her shoulder an hour later.

Nicole hums her approval and blinks her eyes open, heart warming at the sight of Waverly sprawled out beside her in bed, hair spilling out around her on the pillow, those chestnut waves so perfect Nicole has to reach out and touch. The girl may as well be glowing.

“What is it?”

“Why’d we ever have to be a secret?”

And Nicole should’ve known the question would come in time, still doesn’t know which answer is the right one. Because she was a coward? Because Wynonna would’ve been down her throat (ended up doing as much anyway)? ‘Cause she was only the shell of the woman she became in Toronto? Or because she didn’t know how much she was hurting Waverly?

To put it simply:

“I was stupid.”

“I know that, silly,” Waverly tells her, nudges her shoulder with her nose. “Why were you such an idiot, ’Cole?”

It’s questions like that, soft-spoken and teasing, ever affectionate, that make Nicole that much more eager to stay. To dig herself back in deep, to throw herself into the ocean at its deepest with no fear of what lurks in the darkness below.

Which may not even be a possibility.

Caution to the wind, then, yeah?

“Because I didn’t know,” she whispers, and she’s never sounded so small.

There came a point when being an officer of the law taught her that to be strong you must also be unafraid of being vulnerable. That you must be willing to open yourself like a book for another to read if you ever truly wanted their trust.

A kid taught her that.

A scared, barely ten-year-old kid wrapped in an emergency blanket on the side of the road watching his mother’s wrecked Toyota being town off.

He wouldn’t talk to her at first, wouldn’t even look at her. Wasn’t until Nicole hunkered down in the dirt beside him and told him about the first time she watched one of her brothers in blue get carted off in an ambulance. Was nowhere close to watching it happen to your mother, but it scared Nicole shitless and she told the kid as much. Told him it didn’t feel okay until that officer was back on duty with the rest of them, told him he might not feel okay until his mother was healed up and back home and seeing him off to the school bus, but that it would be okay. Promised him as much. He talked to her after that.

“Didn’t know what?” Waverly pulls her back to the present, tugs her favorite bonus blanket up to her chin.

And Nicole wants this trust, so she talks.

Pushes the words out before her mind can drop a roadblock in their path.

“Didn’t know I loved you,” she says simply, prays it isn’t crossing a line. “I didn’t know until after that night we talked in the bar.” But if there’s ever a night for crossing lines, Nicole thinks, this one is it.

At first all she gets is a look. One she can’t quite discern, but there might be relief in there. Hopes there is.

“Oh, you idiot,” Waverly whispers, and then they’re kissing again.

Kissing like they have all the time in the world, like the sun won’t ever rise, like Nicole doesn’t have to work the next day, like Waverly doesn’t have a ring on her finger.

It’s a dangerous game, but their pieces are already in play.


End file.
